The Cherry Orchard @ Adelaide Festival, Festival Theatre, Adelaide 1/3/2026
Acclaimed director Simon Stone (Yerma, Medea, Innocence) returns to the Adelaide Festival with his reimaging of The Cherry Orchard, bringing both history and purpose to the stage.
Co-commissioned by the Festival and produced by LG Arts Centre, this is Anton Chekhov transformed through contemporary Seoul. It is an adaptation that understands the complex duality of heartbreak and humour found in the original work, while situating it squarely within modern corporate Korea.
When Doyoung Song (Doyeon Jeon) returns to Seoul after five years, she finds the family business collapsing and the ancestral home, gifted to her by her grandfather as a sixteenth birthday present, in danger of being lost. What follows is an intimate look into the Song family as they traverse through a transformational time in their lives.
Stone relocates Chekhov’s Russian story to the Korean Song family, watching its empire slide towards insolvency. Jeon’s performance is compelling. She renders the matriarch fragile and expansive at once. A woman paralysed by grief yet unable to relinquish comfort. Opposite her, Haesoo Park brings a calculated intensity to Doosik Hwang, a self-made entrepreneur who eventually seizes control of the Song empire. Park depicts Doosik’s character arch with quiet precision, allowing appreciation and discomfort to coexist.
The ensemble cast is collectively superb. Sangkyu Son lends Jaeyoung Song an irritating smugness, while Moon Choi, as adopted daughter Hyunsook Song, and Jihye Lee, as youngest daughter Haena Song, map the emotional fault lines between duty and artistic rebellion. Yunho Nam, Byunghoon Yoo, Sejun Lee, Juwon Lee and Heejung Park round out the cast with clarity and control, balancing earnestness and humour with their performances.
Saul Kim’s set design is aesthetically pleasing and conceptually striking. There is no orchard in sight. Instead, the Song family home is sprawled across the stage, a sleek architectural cross-section that exposes three rooms to the audience. We see an open-plan kitchen and lounge below, and a bedroom above encased in clear glass. We are voyeurs, peering into confidential arguments, drunken confessions, intimate moments, and complicated birthday celebrations. The transparency of the design echoes the family’s undoing. Wealth is apparent, but so is instability.
The lighting by James Farncombe is effectively restrained, reflecting the passage of time. Warm tones suggest the afternoon sun stretching across the grounds. Cooler hues evoke the onset of night. The shifts are subtle and ground the drama in a rhythm representing domestication. Youngkyu Jang’s music and sound design are similarly sparse. Musical cues surface with care, underscoring emotional pivots. Crucially, silence is permitted its own authority.
The Cherry Orchard is performed entirely in Korean. The use of subtitles initially creates an awkwardness between reading and watching. The eye flickers upward or to the side, then back to the stage. An adjustment period is required, but once the rhythm settles, it becomes second nature, not detracting from the performance.
Stone successfully modernises Chekhov’s work with this adaptation. The production illuminates the lasting ache found in the heart of Chekhov’s work, and while his Cherry Orchard is built of glass and steel rather than trees, its roots run deep. It is an engaging, fast-paced drama and a beguiling addition to the 2026 Adelaide Festival.
Adelaide Festival By Anita Kertes
Season Closed