Publicity notes for The Orchard outline the questions that provoked Pony Cam’s loose adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1904): ‘You’ve inherited a redundant cherry orchard, a crumbling climate, a failing economy and the final play written by Anton Chekhov. What will you salvage? Will you survive the adaptation?’ As far as this audience member is concerned, the answers to those questions are indisputable: ‘Nothing’ and ‘No’.

The appeal of The Cherry Orchard for an ensemble which delights in exposing the excess and fatuousness of contemporary society (Pony Cam have had considerable success in festivals such as RISING and the Melbourne Fringe) is understandable: twenty-first-century productions of the play have stressed its critiques of both capitalism and environmental destruction, themes that continue to resonate. Hewing at Chekhov’s original play with a range of experimental, post-dramatic theatre techniques – partially improvised dialogue, bold physical theatre, conscripted audience members, and a transitory fourth wall – offers the potential for a reinvigoration of Chekhov’s themes; a new lens through which we might examine the way these themes impact our own times. In The Orchard, that potential is marred by a predominantly superficial reading of Chekhov’s text.

The Orchard begins predictably enough for a work of post-dramatic theatre. As we enter, audience members who have agreed to be part of the show are being taken through their paces. Then, when the lights at last go down, an electronic billboard announces ‘Foreword’ and ensemble member Will Strom, now the only actor on the stage, conveys the intention of the piece: to tell the story of The Cherry Orchard without using Chekhov’s words. Shortly after, Strom asks for our indulgence: the ostensible beginning of the play needs to be stalled while we await the arrival of his family whose train has been delayed (a nod to the opening of Chekhov’s play, where the household flusters about in the dead of night preparing for the arrival of the cherry orchard’s matriarch, whose train is also running late). To pass the time, Strom takes questions from the audience.

Using a tangential distraction to delay the commencement of the actual play is a device that avant-garde theatre companies such as Complicité have used to great effect. In works such as Mnemonic (1999), A Disappearing Number (2017), and The Encounter (2018), lectures on memory and maths, or an actor speaking to their child, orient the audience to the thematic concerns and/or technical demands of the play, affording what follows a sharper focus.

Strom’s engagement with the audience, largely because of its unscripted nature, tends to be more confusing than enlightening, the opportunity to embed The Orchard within the context of its source almost wholly dependent on the vagaries of the audience. On opening night, questions about why Pony Cam had chosen to adapt The Cherry Orchard and whether some audience members had been given preprepared questions elicited a few laughs, but did little to align us with the ideas driving The Orchard. (At one preview, questions were angled towards the plot and characters of The Cherry Orchard, giving the audience a clearer understanding of what, exactly, Pony Cam were taking their proverbial axes to.)

Strom’s protracted overture complete, much of the middle section of the play is given over to a series of mic’d speeches, ranging from economics lectures to political diatribes. The cherry orchard – the building, we are told, in which we are sitting – is facing a financial crisis. Costs are up, income is down. Without some scheme to save it, the orchard will be sold: the potential to develop the site makes the land infinitely more valuable than the enterprise itself.

The orchard’s workers (performed with great energy and passion by ensemble members Strom, Claire Bird, Ava Campbell, Dominic Weintraub, and Hugo Williams) – all outfitted in cherry red uniforms – are being pushed to the brink. They need to reduce breaks and increase output (we might be in the fulfilment centre of a mega corporation such as Amazon). The cherry orchard, which in Chekhov’s version represents death and the passing of time, becomes a metaphor for rampant capitalism and its concomitant social and environmental costs. Intentionally or not, it is a metaphor that tends to blur around the edges. Sometimes it feels like the cherry orchard is a family operation whose business model is no longer sustainable. At other times, the speeches might be referencing the Malthouse Theatre itself (which has yielded few significant cherries since the departure of Artistic Director Michael Kantor in 2010), or the precarious nature of work in ‘creative industries’ (as governments prefer us to call them) such as theatre.

The Orchard (photograph by Pia Johnson)

Interleaving the speeches are dozens of semi-improvised conversations, each of them triggered by the question: ‘What are we going to do about the cherry orchard?’ What seems to be an attempt to capture the apparent trivialities in the dialogue of Chekhov’s characters becomes here a litany of banality; blandness masquerading as dramatic innovation. It all smacks of a theatre-school exercise that has been stretched to the point where it doesn’t so much break as become sad and limp.

In the final act of the play the ‘What are we going to do about the cherry orchard?’ discussions take on an explosive, even nihilistic, character. Visually, its exhilarating theatre, but the actual words are lost in the eruption of lights (lighting design by Harrie Hogan), pounding music, and movement. When the orchard is finally reduced to little more than splinters, it is difficult to know whether the workers’ actions have been motivated by defiance or despair.

In its sardonic stage and costume design (Sophie Woodward), The Orchard plays with stereotypical stage renditions of Russia. There are teapots, fur hats and coats, dark wooden furnishings, and people scribbling in estate books. But much of this is sidelined, hidden along the wings of the theatre. The audience volunteers are similarly wasted, hovering about among the wardrobe and furnishings, not entirely sure of their purpose. There is almost a feel of the company throwing into this production as many post-dramatic ticks as possible, never stopping to see whether they actually cohere.

In his foreword to the play, Strom noted that The Orchard aims to replicate something of the shock that The Cherry Orchard’s first audiences might have experienced, encountering theatre that not only foregrounded the social revolution that Russia was undergoing, but also a new, progressive mode of theatre: realism. Pony Cam’s aims are well-founded – confronting audiences and forcing them to re-examine their preconceptions should be the bedrock of theatre – but the mistake Pony Cam makes is deeming their work sufficiently experimental and provocative to shock.

Deconstructed classics such The Orchard have an important place in our theatre ecosystem, if only to allow us to see more clearly the depths of Chekhov’s original. But let’s not pretend that such theatre is necessarily radical or clever. A work such as this might have been regarded as groundbreaking once upon a time, but, like it or not, this species of theatre is now mainstream. There are few surprises in The Orchard and little that genuinely challenges. In fact, this is theatre than panders to preconceptions and biases rather than subverting them. In reducing The Cherry Orchard to its lowest common denominator, The Orchard squanders the intricacies of Chekhov’s original. There is no venture capitalist who was born to a family of serfs. There is no aristocrat who is generous to a literal fault. And the tragicomic mismatch of characters’ desires and competencies is shrunk down to a series of disconnected epithets: student, neighbour, landowner.

In discarding Chekhov’s intricate study of a society in such a state of flux that no one yet understands their proper place in the new world – in discarding Chekhov’s characters and all their internal contradictions – The Orchard does not so much destabilise The Cherry Orchard as destroy it. This would not be so much of a problem if what emerged in its place was engaging, intelligent theatre – theatre that complicates our beliefs about the consequences of capitalism and environmental destruction – but The Orchard is, to borrow from Shakespeare, a lot of sound and fury signifying not much of anything at all. For every intriguing moment, every stirring sequence, there are scores more that are tedious, half-baked, and distractingly smug.

The Orchard (Pony Cam) continues at the Malthouse Theatre until 16 August 2025. Performance attended: August 7.