★★★★★
Blue light comes through two windows at Star Theatres. Inside, there’s a rocking horse, an old bookcase and a fine samovar. Religious pictures hang on walls painted to look like grained timber.
Tea has to be made, luggage has to be moved, and somebody ought to know where the galoshes are. It’s a house full of people who know how things are done and have very little idea what to do next.
Independent Theatre’s The Cherry Orchard, directed by Rob Croser, is the Australian premiere of Samuel Adamson’s version, which he has revised for this production. Croser first met Adamson when he auditioned for the company in 1989.
There’s a pleasing reversal in that history: the young actor comes back as the playwright, and the director who once cast him now trusts him enough to leave the play’s biggest argument unsettled. Chekhov thought he’d written a comedy, even a farce in places. Stanislavsky read a tragedy. Croser gives both men plenty to argue with.
Sue Wylie’s Charlotta has puppets and card tricks and gets to play them for all they’re worth. Chris Bleby’s Gaev is a sot who can make a speech to a bookcase sound like an obligation everyone else has failed to take seriously. He’s ridiculous, and there’s something sad about how little he knows of the effect he has on people.
Christopher Crook’s accident-prone estate clerk Yepikhodov is hard to like, right up until you see him stranded beside Hailee Martin’s Dunyasha and Tarcisio De Zolt’s Yasha.
Those two smoulder. With his mop of curls and his smirk, De Zolt makes Yasha a thoroughly repellent young bully. The program bio takes pains to assure us that the actor is nothing like him.
Chekhov wrote the play after the emancipation of Russia’s serfs and before the Bolshevik Revolution. The old world is dying; the new one is having trouble getting born. A time of monsters, perhaps, though good luck picking them.
The family has lived for generations on other people’s labour. Stuart Pearce’s Lopakhin, the son of a serf, can see exactly how to make the land pay. He can’t bring himself to propose to Naomi Voortman’s Varya.
Adamson points out the symmetry in his program essay: the businessman is baffled by Ranevskaya’s inability to make a commercial decision yet stalls when the decision is his and the subject is love.
Joseph Callaghan’s Trofimov is terrific. Give him a chair, and he’ll find a soapbox. There’s a flash of a young Lenin or Trotsky in the way he gets up above everyone and talks as though the future will arrive sooner if they’d only listen.
The program notes that two of Trofimov’s speeches were censored before the original production. Callaghan makes that easy to believe. He also makes it easy to believe someone could be swept up by this young man and only later wonder what he’d be willing to sacrifice to make his ideas real.
Croser and David Roach’s set has the presence you’d expect from Independent Theatre. The tall rear walls open wide enough to give the house a courtyard or a sky. Piano interludes carry the scene changes; birds and barking dogs give the estate a life beyond the rooms.
By sunset, the light has done more than mark the passing of a day. Then comes the twang of a string breaking. In a production where the samovar and the luggage are so solidly themselves, that unplaceable sound is startling. Something has been wound too tight for too long. You can restring it, but the room has already heard it snap.
Simon Stone’s version, set in Seoul and seen at this year’s Adelaide Festival, put more weight on the landowner’s grief. That grief is still there in Lyn Wilson’s Ranevskaya: the dead child, the wrong man, the childhood home she cannot bear to lose.
Croser gives the last of the evening’s weight to David Roach’s Firs. Everyone else finds somewhere to go. The old footman, who spent his life remembering what other people needed, is forgotten in the rush to leave.
The sound of axes has a particular bite in Adelaide, where the fate of trees in the Park Lands is being argued over in the name of a motorcycle race. Lopakhin would recognise the argument that the land could be put to more profitable use. He might have had a pitch for a data centre, too.
Firs raises the harder question. If technology frees people from work that has given their days a shape, what will they do with the freedom? Gaev could play billiards and make speeches to the furniture. Firs has never had that luxury.
In his essay, Adamson takes up Dominic Dromgoole’s description of Chekhov as ‘beyond’. His own sympathies have moved, over the years, from the men impatient for change towards the woman who loves the orchard. Do we need to pick a side, though?
It’s possible to be glad that the old order is ending and still want somebody to go back for Firs.
The Cherry Orchard is presented by Independent Theatre and runs to 21 November 2026 at Star Theatres. 145 Sir Donald Bradman Drive Hilton SA 5033.
Tickets: https://www.trybooking.com/au/event/1576373
Website: https://www.independenttheatre.org.au/
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/independenttheatreinc/
Photo credits: Nik Long
Leave a Reply