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Review: The Cherry Orchard, directed by Clare Watson. Black Swan State Theatre Company for the Perth Festival.
Stories get told over and over, each version sitting atop every other in a never-ending palimpsest. Extracting and extending the metaphors of Anton Chekhov’s classic 1904 play The Cherry Orchard, this production adapted by Adriane Daff and Katherine Tonkin and directed by Clare Watson is as much about its staging at a former hospital as it is about the story and characters.
Reimagined in 1980s Western Australia, the parallels to Chekhov’s treatise on class and land work well: the mining boom, the influx of property developers, Australia (specifically WA) winning the America’s Cup, the Black Tuesday stock market crash, the gross short-sightedness of the Bicentennial celebrating only “200 years of Australian history”.