Search me why you would want to see a Cherry Orchard out of historical context?  Australian Director Benedict Andrews has vaguely set this one in the late 1980s just before Perestroika where the regime was not the owners of the Cherry Orchards which have all been felled to accommodate the building of dachas?  This means that the central theme of the play becomes mismanagement of debt and the rewritten Marxist speeches of Pyotr Trofimov Sergeevich (Daniel Monks) have a greater impact. June Watson plays the aged servant Firs in a gender switch. 

There is a programme note on environmental change with the idea that Russia’s gentry estates were making way for industrialisation and the destruction of forests, woodlands, river systems and micro climates.  I did not pick this up from the production, only from the programme. 

Most of the cast, when not onstage, sit anonymously in the audience and their costume does not pick them out as actors rather than audience members. Most extravagantly dressed is Leonard Gaev Andreevich (Michael Gould) in maybe 70s paint splattered shirt and turquoise trousers.  Gaev is chewing Chapa Chops lollipops and I’m not sure what era that makes him.  Gaev is waxing lyrical over a 100 year old bookcase and suggesting they should throw it a birthday party.  Lopakhin, the property developer is not welcomed by anybody.  We remember that Chekhov’s family were originally peasants.