‘What 'are’ we going to do about the orchard?‘ Pony Cam takes on Chekhov classic for Malthouse debut
- Written by Jonathan Graffam-O’Meara, PhD Candidate in Theatre, Monash University
Pony Cam makes its mainstage debut at Malthouse Theatre with The Orchard, an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s classic.
The company has recently produced a string of successes by launching new works at the Melbourne Fringe Festival that have then gone on to be programmed in prestigious mainstream arts festivals. The production Grand Theft Theatre was later programmed in Adelaide Festival; Burnout Paradise featured in RISING Festival. Pony Cam includes performer-devisors Claire Bird, Ava Campbell, William Strom, Dominic Weintraub and Hugo Williams.
The team has forged a reputation for bold experimentation, blending spectacle and community with hybrid theatrical forms and legacies.
On the choice to adapt Chekhov’s final play, originally composed in 1903, the team reflects:
Our practice has always been built around making new work – creating our own worlds while borrowing shamelessly and stealing lovingly from the shows and artists that came before us. But adaptation – the act of reshaping an existing body, innovating within the scaffold of tradition – was unfamiliar terrain.
Boldness and whimsy
At the outset of The Orchard, Strom greets the audience, microphone in hand, for an introduction to proceedings. He tells us the team is presenting Chekhov’s play “without the dialogue”. Gone too is its four-act structure.
Some audience members have been poached from the foyer 15 minutes before show time to act as co-performers; we’re told most scenes will be improvised.
For those unfamiliar with Chekhov’s play, Strom distils key narrative features that made The Cherry Orchard innovative for its time.
The family that owns the cherry orchard no longer has the money or resources to maintain the estate. The return to this place at the start of the play marks a coming together from various regions of Russia in what seems an attempt to save it.
There is no hero’s journey in this play; the tension – its drama – is in characters not taking action or necessarily speaking truth to feeling when it matters.
The result is that the family loses the orchard; the final moment features the heartbreaking sounds of axes on wood. It is this non-action that Pony Cam explores with signature boldness and whimsy in The Orchard.
On Strom’s cue, the remaining cast – including participating audience-performers – emerge in a cloud of haze from a garage door at the back of the theatre.
High-energy physicality
Sophie Woodward’s set design centres a large raised platform on which the main action takes place. The platform is surrounded by antique furniture pieces with kitschy adornments.
Woodward dresses the Pony Cam team in matching burgundy tones with red vests, complemented by an assortment of stereotype-laden Russian-inspired furs.
Participating audience members are also given furs but otherwise remain in the clothes they wore to the theatre. These guest performers spend the show unpacking and organising more antique items or completing assigned tasks from the cast.
In various iterations and groupings, Bird, Campbell, Strom, Weintraub and Williams climb on and off the central platform, taking turns to ask:
What are we going to do about the orchard?
Improvised responses sometimes address the problem, but mostly the conversations devolve into personal histories, feelings, family relationships, or the increasing toxicity of modern work life and the unaffordability of rest time.
The same question is asked again and again: “What are we going to do about the orchard?”
The performers at times grab a microphone at the front of the stage to embody character archetypes from Chekhov’s play.
In these monologues, the orchard is rendered synonymous to local artistic landscapes (possibly the Malthouse itself).
There’s little to no funding relief, no government intervention, no philanthropy; the performers list soaring annual shortfall figures, and even take pains to explain how cost disease continues to drive up the cost of making new work.
Campbell poignantly remarks into the microphone:
It’s not that our work has failed; it’s that the world changed around us.
It hits like a punch to the gut.
The show is infused with signature Pony Cam high-energy physicality. As the heat of the performance rises – accompanied by increasing climate temperature figures projected overhead – so too does the (in)action of the figures in this play.
In an extended dance sequence set to Russian electronic dance music, the team showcase their extraordinary performance prowess. Such sequences are supported by a bold and flamboyant lighting design by Harrie Hogan.
Inaction and atrophy
At the heart of The Orchard is a rumination on cultural inaction and atrophy. While it speaks to local creative landscapes, climate inaction and other current political conditions are necessarily evoked.
For a company rooted in fringe and independent theatre, Pony Cam uses its mainstage debut to explore how inaction makes the temptation of selling out to corporate interests – land, venues, business, art, merchandise, ideas, creativity, people – seem like the only escape from this plight.
This is how Pony Cam mines the rich veins of Chekhov’s original.
What are we going to do about the orchard?
The Orchard is at Malthouse Theatre until August 16.
Authors: Jonathan Graffam-O’Meara, PhD Candidate in Theatre, Monash University
