Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price Chekhov's classic tragicomedy, translated and introduced by Stephen Mulrine. Aristocratic landowner Ranevskaya can no longer afford to keep her childhood home with its beautiful but barren cherry orchard. She rejects the compromise offered by Lopakhin, a local businessman, to cut down the orchard and sell the land for holiday homes. Eventually Ranevskaya and her family are forced to leave the estate which Lopakhin has now bought. Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard was first staged at the Moscow Art Theatre in January 1904 in a production directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky. This translation by Stephen Mulrine, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, was first performed by English Touring Theatre in 2000.