... Interestingly, many of the most striking productions of the play seen in Moscow and St. Petersburg were by non-Russian directors from other former Soviet States. The Lithuanian Eimuntas Nekrošius and the Estonian Adolph Shapiro both directed The Cherry Orchard in Moscow in its centenary year, 2004. Nekrošius' production was six hours long. It featured the kind of detailed, idiosyncratic theatrical invention for which the Lithuanian director was famous, according to John Freedman of the Moscow Times: "It certainly could not be mistaken for the work of any other director. The actors' improvisations that transform into self-sufficient mini-dramas; the unexpected visual metaphors involving props; the hurricane-like energy of young actresses hurtling about the stage – Nekrošius has brought all of this into his Russian version of The Cherry Orchard."

Before the play even began, Firs slowly, inexplicably pulled a dozen coats off a chair. Ranevskaya (Ludmilla Maksakova) entered and lay down like a corpse, to be carried out as if to her funeral; she remained a spectre throughout the performance, absorbed in her own griefs and complexes. Yevgeny Mironov made Lopakhin a menacing figure from Putin's Moscow: "a guy you will certainly like, a future gangster with the makings of a tycoon, an ugly symbol of the new life in Russia." All the other characters were headsick and doomed.

The cherry orchard was composed of clumped weather vanes; at the end of the play the characters were all herded into it like hunted rabbits. The costumes were in drab shades of grey and brown; the chief set-pieces were "two dirty structures that could be anything from unmarked graves to tiny policemen's booths." The discordant soundtrack began with a Mahlerian death march and included painfully loud cricket sounds, an ironic wink at Stanislavsky. The dance beginning Act III was a hellish saturnalia after Hieronymus Bosch, filled with cripples, monsters and witches.

The whole production was saturated with dread about life in the new Russia, according to Arkady Petrov: "In his own cherry orchard drama, Eimuntas Nekrošius ... plunged us into an abyss of horrors by opening our eyes on how little the start of last century differed from the beginning of this one, and how much in common we share with "them." The implication was that "their" disasters could befall us, with the complicity and connivance of "their" new reincarnations living among us." ...