When French philosopher Roland Barthes coined the term “Death of the author,” favouring each personal interpretation of art over the creator’s intentions, he probably didn’t envision Pony Cam collective’s drive-by shooting of revered Russian playwright, Anton Chekhov.
But so it is when William Strom, deadpan as you like, strolls onto Malthouse’s Beckett stage as the word ‘foreword’ flashes up on a vast neon lighting bank behind him, glaring like the waning sun sizzling on the horizon.
Outlining a brief synopsis and key characters of The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov’s celebrated final play, Strom then delivers a mic drop par excellence. What we’re about to see, in their irreverent take, The Orchard, does not feature a single line from Chekhov’s weighty text. They’ve chopped it all down.
Sure, Strom, Ava Campbell, Claire Bird, Dominic Weintraub and Hugo Williams very loosely inhabit the play’s sprawling story, while also deploying a gaggle of up-for-it audience members recruited in the foyer to help capture the spirit of a roiling society.
It focuses on a turn of the 20th-century Russian family of aristocratic nitwits too paralysed with indecision to save their failing sour cherry orchard from bankruptcy. All the while, the middle class are on the rise, with opportunities to climb that ladder as serfdom – aka slavery – fell away, presenting fresh competition for those too used to the silver spoon.
Set and costume designer Sophie Woodward’s simple staging places the red-tunicked cast on a raised dais in the centre of the space, like a town hall meeting. An inscrutable Mona Lisa-smiling Weintraub, armed with a marching band’s drum, leads our infamous five into chaotic call-and-response improv sparked by:
“Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, what are we going to do about the orchard?”
The family’s oft-repeated mantra presents half-hearted responses, from illegal secret room rentals to history-focused school trips, and demands employees work harder and longer with fewer breaks. Along the way, we get a run-down on profit and loss, soaring real estate value and workers’ rights under siege.
If that sounds like a chore, panic not, for this is Pony Cam. Their version of The Orchard has more in common with their deliriously delightful show Burnout Paradise than it does an economics lecture.
That five-star smash hit saw them attempt to fill out an arts funding application while communally jogging on speeding treadmills, bombarded with inanely menial additional tasks made far more hazardous by that set-up and provoking hysterical physical comedy. And yet, the far-out silliness smartly underlined just how hard it is for artists to create work in our manufactured by the powers that be cost-of-living crisis.
The Orchard takes that idea and runs with it (no treadmills included). With a hint of The Wolf of Wall Street rinsed through housing activist Purple Pingers’ online presence, we realise their read on the text is mapped to the absolute state we’re communally in now.
As that neon sign shows the steady tick-tock of the doomsday clock of ever-rising temperatures, we listen to all the ways the greedy rich have fractured the system to shore up their power.
At the edges, the game audience recruits potter around the edges. Revealing dust-sheeted furniture and donning furs, they scrabble through scratchie cards, pack their cases and try and fail to get a coupe champagne glass fountain happening, to inadvertently excellent comic effect.
All the while, Pony Cam's “hey, heys” get more and more out of puff as the show transitions into an unhinged, HI-NRG rave, representing the family’s increasingly desperate and mercenary response. More complex than the daftness suggests, an emotional core about how difficult families push and pull sprouts amongst the sawdust and tears.
But empathy is in short supply for those who would set fire to the timber, causing the entire system to cash in. There’s much in here about how both the arts and commerce crowd out those at the bottom and, increasingly, the lower end of the middle in favour of the haves who can’t get enough and claw for ever more, more, more.
By the time a hydraulic log-splitter is hauled out, we’re in on the gag that it’s our future that’s splintering irreparably. Once again, Pony Cam have energetically entertained us while eliciting interminable dread at the state of *gestures broadly* everything.
It’s a race, then, to right the world while we still have time – started, of course, by Chekhov’s gun.
The Orchard is showing at Malthouse's Beckett Theatre until August 16. For more information and to book tickets, head to the website.
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