Theatre
Independent collective Pony Cam took on Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard to make a work about artists as a vanishing class in today’s Australia. By Keith Gow.
Reality Checkov: Pony Cam’s The Orchard
In 2018, the Victorian state government announced a $208 million investment for a major redevelopment of the Melbourne Arts Precinct. It includes the building of a new contemporary art gallery, significant upgrades to the State Theatre and the renewal of public spaces that connect these buildings, from Hamer Hall down to the Malthouse Theatre. By 2021, the investment in the ongoing development of this infrastructure had increased to $1.7 billion.
For the year ending December 31, 2024, the Playbox Theatre Company Limited, which trades as the Malthouse Theatre, reported an operating loss of $640,000. It stays afloat through reserves that are dwindling year by year.
The Orchard, theatre collective Pony Cam’s response to Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, is a piece of postdramatic theatre that analyses the increasing difficulty of making art under capitalism. The five-member ensemble considers the cost-of-living crisis, worsening climate disasters and other impacts on a sector that is on the brink of collapse just as Pony Cam is finding success.
Pony Cam is an award-winning independent theatre company whose group-devised shows are bold and inventive. It toured its most recent work, Burnout Paradise, from Edinburgh to London and New York, with many a fringe festival in between. That show tackled exhaustion in arts workers, with four of the ensemble members running on treadmills for an hour trying to accomplish tasks – including completing a grant application – with the help of the audience.
The Orchard begins with audience participation. Pony Cam member William Strom takes questions from the crowd, ostensibly waiting for his family to arrive on a late-running train – a nod to the opening of Chekhov’s final play. The family are five people plucked from the foyer before the show. They don fur coats and hats and are given a list of tasks, adding an intriguing and delightful texture and tension to the piece. In contrast, costume designer Sophie Woodward dresses the Pony Cam collective in cherry-red uniforms.
The set (also by Woodward) is a raised platform centrestage with various props and set pieces relegated to the sides – old furniture and knick-knacks that evoke a more traditional production of a Russian classic. The design echoes that of Kat Chan’s work on The Birds earlier this year in the same space, acting as a kind of commentary on the perceived sameness of mainstage theatre.
For much of the show, the five performers – Strom, Claire Bird, Ava Campbell, Dominic Weintraub and Hugo Williams – stand in different configurations on the elevated stage playing an improvisation game called “Ding”. Here, instead of a bell, the signal to reset the scene is the bang of a bass drum.
“Hey,” says each actor, “what are we going to do about the orchard?” In turn they offer advice on how to save it, or reveal their dreams if the place goes under. One is looking forward to relaxing. Another will be free to reconnect with friends they have neglected while working long hours to keep their careers afloat. The repetition and rhythm of the drumbeat, the questions and the elliptical answers, becomes hypnotic. In effect, it re-creates the banal, naturalistic discussions of Chekhov’s play, which don’t ultimately save the family home or the cherry orchard.
Occasionally one of the actors steps up onto a wooden stump with microphone in hand and explicates the problems of the orchard. It is here they quote from the Malthouse Theatre’s annual reports. As the show continues, it becomes increasingly apparent what they are arguing about and for.
They must “rehearse cherries”. It takes as long as it’s always taken to create “cherries”, but wages haven’t increased. And while making theatre has always involved emotional labour, there is now an added level of negotiation in the room while creating work that is thoughtful, sensitive and inclusive.
Once we’re fully aware the show is unpacking the troubles of an arts industry that is increasingly risk-averse, with artists only making work for fellow artists, the production shifts gear and the improvisation stops. The ensemble dances in unison. The heavy-beat music, the bruising sound design and Harrie Hogan’s overwhelming lighting reconfigure the space into something coarse and machine-like. Ensemble member Bird articulates a depressing future – or is it the present? – where the land is sold, only the façade of the theatre is saved and the void is filled by apartments.
The Orchard is a commission by a theatre company that wanted a work with name recognition. These innovative, chaotic theatrical magicians took the component parts of a 120-year-old text and crafted something that argues for the future of theatre itself.
It reminded me of Daniel Schlusser’s Menagerie, which played at Melbourne Theatre Company’s Neon Festival in 2013. That production didn’t so much adapt Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie as interrogate it. Schlusser took vital elements of the play and crafted a challenging essay on the torment of the creative process. Pony Cam manages a similar reworking here.
Chekhov called The Cherry Orchard “a comedy in four acts”, although its first director, Konstantin Stanislavski, considered it a tragedy. Pony Cam tackles this duality in an interesting way: what we are watching is knife-edge thrilling, then heart-pumping in its physicality; hilarious in improvisation but tragic in its outcome.
Early on, the call-and-response of the ensemble questioning each other was halting and hesitant, so the laughs of the crowd were scattered. The raw honesty of the answers could be genuinely shocking: piercing insights aren’t always crowd-pleasers. For me the boldness of their approach elevated the scattershot material to something passionate and cerebral. As the show progressed, it gathered steam into a rousing piece of agitprop.
The Cherry Orchard is about a vanishing class of Russian society – the bourgeoisie – and this new show offers a parallel: the slow disintegration of a generation of artists robbed of opportunities. It’s bleak, but with government funding on the decline and the continuing closure of venues vital to the artistic life of this country, it’s real.
The Orchard is angry and unvarnished in its commentary on how the artistic landscape is being bulldozed by governments who would rather raise buildings than artists. By the end, the central dais is violently cast aside and a wood-splitter emerges, whittling logs into kindling. All that remains of the orchard is splinters.
“Instead of going to see plays, you ought to go look at yourself,” says the orchard’s wealthy owner, Lyuba Ranevskaya, in Chekhov’s play. But the theatre is a way to look at ourselves. Pony Cam knows this and its work celebrates it. The Orchard is a scream of defiance. It has no answers but to keep making art.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 23, 2025 as "Reality Checkov".
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