Anton Chekhov wrote The Cherry Orchard sensing that the world around him was about to vanish. It seems that director Simon Stone’s production of the play – a keystone work in this year’s Adelaide Festival – will be charged with a similar sense of historical unease.

Set in modern-day Seoul among the city’s wealthy establishment families, the production sets out to reckon with a work whose anxieties – personal agency, memory, the fragility of social order – feel alive in what is in era of uncertainty.

Speaking to Limelight from Vienna, Stone reflects on his relationship with the play – one that has deepened greatly since he first directed it for Melbourne Theatre Company in 2013.

“All of Chekhov’s plays are utter masterpieces,” Stone says, “but there’s something about space and its relationship to grief in this one.” The play’s great estate, with its famous orchard, is not simply a setting but a vessel for memory – a place where the past is stored, mourned and finally erased....