Uncle Vanya gets disrupted by ASMR, TikTok and live wrestling

There's a moment early on where you realise Paper Mouth Theatre isn't just quoting the attention economy. They're staging a fight with it, live, on top of Chekhov's corpse. And somehow, against all odds, Chekhov wins almost as often as the soap does.

Writer/director Mary Angley's premise sounds like a joke that can't sustain itself past the title: take Uncle Vanya, one of the great slow-burn studies in wasted lives and unspoken longing, and run it alongside gameplay footage, TikTok choreography, a live ASMR soap-cutting feed, and, because why not, a pro-wrestling smackdown. On paper it reads as a stunt. In the room, it's something stranger and more interesting: a genuine tug-of-war between the pleasure of distraction and the pull of real feeling, with the audience caught in the middle.

Bianka Kennedy's set design deserves real credit here. It opens as a faithful, handsome rendering of the Russian country estate, the kind of backdrop that could sit in any traditional staging of the play, before proving itself endlessly adaptable, shifting and reconfiguring to accommodate everything the show throws at it, boxing ring included. It's a smart piece of design precisely because it earns your trust early, playing it straight before the chaos arrives.

That trust is built by a strong opening ensemble. Aaron Beattie, Yoz Mench, Poppy Mee, Ellen Graham, Lucy Haas and Dan Thorpe land the audience squarely inside Chekhov's world before anything gets disrupted, playing the text's own restless, searching quality with an ease that makes the later interruptions land harder by contrast. Technical credit should also go to the show's backstage wizardry, billed fittingly as "Fraz the Wizard," whose work threading live and electronic sound, tech cues and design elements together in real time is a large part of why the show's chaos never actually feels chaotic.

The production's smartest move is knowing exactly where to cut. Act Three, Chekhov's most static, talkiest stretch, is skimmed rather than played out in full, with the director literally clicking through a PowerPoint to summarise its plot beats and move things along. It's a bald, funny admission of exactly what the show is up to, and it works: rather than feeling like a loss, the compression keeps momentum through what can otherwise be a sagging middle act in more traditional stagings.

Elsewhere, the show leans hard into its own chaos and mostly earns the laughs. A rave-drinking scene stages Vanya and Astrov's drunken despair as an actual rave, full tilt, and it's a genuinely funny recalibration of a scene usually played for quiet devastation. The gag lands because it understands the sadness underneath it, rather than replacing it. Dialogue delivered mid-choreography, actors trading lines while running through TikTok-style routines, has a similar effect. It's funny because of the mismatch, not despite it.

The decision to rotate performers through roles, with each major character played by around three different actors over the night, is the boldest and riskiest choice in the show. It mostly pays off as a way of underlining Chekhov's point that these people are interchangeable in their misery, trapped in the same repeating patterns regardless of who's speaking the lines. It does occasionally cost the production some emotional continuity, but that instability feels like part of the design rather than a flaw in it.

What's most impressive is that none of this reads as parody. Angley and her collaborators clearly love this text, and the show never sneers at the ASMR crowd or the doomscrolling instinct it's needling. The performance I attended played to a full house, loud with unguarded laughter that's hard to fake and harder still to sustain across 95 minutes.

Uncle Vanya – But There's ASMR Soap-Cutting Videos Playing In The Bottom Right Corner plays at Adelaide College of the Arts, Main Theatre, until 18 July 2026, as the first production in State Theatre Company South Australia's SPARK program. Five stars, and one of the smartest, funniest nights of theatre Adelaide will see this year.