Belvoir St Theatre’s artistic director Eamon Flack remembers the moment he first read The Cherry Orchard by Russian playwright Anton Chekhov.

“It was on a verandah in Perth in my first year in drama school,” he says. “I was lying in a friend’s hammock. That was exactly 20 years ago. I remember a funny feeling of familiarity I had with it and some sort of excitement. It’s funny, I haven’t thought about that for a long time.”

Flack’s connection with the 117-year-old play, which he is directing from his own adaptation for a season at Belvoir St Theatre that starts on Saturday, came from memories of his peripatetic childhood.

“My father had a knack for getting retrenched or fired, or for resigning in high dudgeon,” he says. “And so we kept having to leave where we were at. You’d connect to a place and then you get kicked out of it and you have to move on to the next one. I moved five times before I was eight and my response was just being a dreamer.” (more…)