Cherry Orchard

Liubov Ranevskya, a widowed landowner returns home more or less insolvent after five years abroad. Everything appears just as she remembers, but hers is a diminishing world. Her vast and beautiful cherry orchard is soon to be sold off against her mounting debts. The insistent warnings of Lopakhin, a peasant's son turned wealthy businessman, go unheeded, and more than the family estate is sacrificed as Trofimov, the 'eternal student' who hopes to inherit the future, tells her, "The whole of Russia is our orchard".

Tom Stoppard's adaptation of Chekhov's last play is a poignant snapshot of the great, slow-rolling change that came to a head with the Russian revolution in 1917.

Tom Stoppard's English version of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard had its first New York performance at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn in January 2009, and its first London performance at the Old Vic Theatre in May 2009.

Anton Chekhov, Russian dramatist and short-story writer, was born in 1860, the son of a grocer and the grandson of a serf. After graduating in medicine from Moscow University in 1884, he began to make his name in the theatre with the one-act comedies The Bear, The Proposal and The Wedding. His earliest full-length plays, Ivanov (1887) and The Wood Demon (1889), were not successful, and The Seagull, produced in 1896, was a failure until a triumphant revival by the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898. This was followed by Uncle Vanya (1899), Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904), shortly after the production of which Chekhov died. The first English translations of his plays were performed within five years of his death. Tom Stoppard's work includes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Inspector Hound, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, After Magritte, Dirty Linen, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink, The Invention of Love, the trilogy The Coast of Utopia, Rock 'n' Roll, The Hard Problem and Leopoldstadt. His radio plays include If You're Glad I'll Be Frank, Albert's Bridge, Where Are They Now?, Artist Descending a Staircase, The Dog It Was That Died, In the Native State and Darkside (incorporating Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon). Television work includes Professional Foul, Squaring the Circle and Parade's End. Film credits include Empire of the Sun, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which he also directed, Shakespeare in Love, Enigma and Anna Karenina.