★★★★★
“Sit anywhere you like. Just don’t step on the dirt.”
It is the first instruction audiences receive on entering the AC Arts Main Theatre. Three islands of red earth spread across the floor before the stage. Two more sit closer to the action. Behind them, trees sway across a wide projection screen. The forest looks almost breathable. On the couch, Vanya sleeps.
For a moment, Paper Mouth Theatre’s Uncle Vanya – But There’s ASMR Soap-Cutting Videos Playing in the Bottom Right Corner appears ready to begin exactly where Anton Chekhov left it. That illusion does not last.
Written in the late 1890s and first staged by the Moscow Art Theatre in 1899, Uncle Vanya remains one of Chekhov’s defining works. Its characters live on a rural estate sustained by unseen labour.
They regret wasted years, desire the wrong people and wait for life to begin. It never does. Mary Angley’s production begins by showing how well this ensemble can play Chekhov straight.
Arran Beattie enters as the doctor Astrov, speaking in his own Scottish accent among Australian voices. Ellen Graham’s Sonia makes tea. Poppy Mee’s Marina peels potatoes. The rhythms are patient and domestic. Cups move. People wait. Thoughts take time to emerge.
Then Yoz’s Vanya enters with his phone out. It is a small gesture, but instantly recognisable. Every social gathering has that moment. Who will be the first person to leave the room without physically leaving it?
The phone camera is linked to the enormous screen behind the actors. Suddenly, Marina’s potato peeling appears in close-up. We watch the live scene and its digital copy at once. Attention divides. The production follows it.
Paper Mouth Theatre describes this work as neither an adaptation nor a parody. The company has not pasted online culture over Chekhov for easy laughs. It places the original drama inside the conditions through which contemporary audiences now receive almost everything.
Dialogue competes with projections. Actors begin monologues while other images and sounds tug at the eye. Whispering, slicing and soap-cutting ASMR enter the space. At times, the performance feels less like watching a play than inhabiting a browser with too many tabs open.
Six brave audience members sit on wooden chairs beside the front of the stage. At times they are offered large yellow button marked with a cross. When a monologue threatens to continue too long, they may press it and skip ahead.
The button is funny. It is also uncomfortable. What do we lose when we remove the parts that ask the most patience from us? What do we gain?
Before an answer can settle, Angley bursts onto the stage and informs us that the production will skip Act Two. It is mostly character development anyway.
Russian landowners talk about agrarian and industrial concerns. Everyone suffers. Everyone drinks. We understand. Angley then condenses the act into a rapid PowerPoint presentation.
Those who saw her Fringe work explaining how Sandy dies at the beginning of Grease will recognise the form. Here, the slides move through Chekhov’s plot while quietly indicting the modern urge to make everything faster and easier.
We no longer toil on the land: we tap on phones and keyboards. We do not boil the samovar: we order Uber Eats. The routine is very funny because the critique includes both performer and audience. Nobody leaves untouched.
After more than a century of watching capital crush workers, wealth accumulate, and financial systems collapse, Angley suggests we may not need another long evening reminding us oppression exists. We know.
The problem is what we do with that knowledge. We doomscroll, we binge cartoons, we take online quizzes, we watch TikTok dances. We give ourselves small treats.
The audience receives stickers. There is a quiz, there is wrestling, there are dance breaks. Distraction becomes both the subject of the production and the method by which it proceeds.
This is not a smug attack on reduced attention spans. Paper Mouth understands the comfort of dissociation too well for that. The pleasure is real. So is the need beneath it.
Felicity Boyd’s choreography turns despair into rhythm. References to suicide arrive through hip-hop cadences while bodies keep moving. Two dance sequences erupt during the performance. They are joyful, ridiculous and slightly desperate.
The pro-wrestling sequence performs a similar function. Stylised aggression offers a safe container for real aggression. Bodies can slam together. The audience can laugh; the violence ends on cue.
The quiz between Acts Three and Four doubles as cover for a scene change. It also tests whether we have followed anything amid the noise.
We have. That may be the most unnerving discovery of the night. Our attention is not absent. It has become diffuse. We can follow Chekhov, watch a secondary video, listen to whispering and anticipate a role switch almost simultaneously.
About those role switches: just because a performer begins the evening as one character does not guarantee they will remain there.
Some changes happen for gloriously absurd reasons. Others carry more weight. Revealing them would spoil both the comedy and several of the production’s sharpest ideas.
The switches ask how much of a character belongs to the text, the actor or the authority assigning the role. They also ask who is permitted to dominate a room and who must absorb the consequences.
Angley plays the Professor. She is also, in another sense, our theatre professor.
Vanya accuses Chekhov’s Professor of spending his career writing about art without understanding it. Angley understands it so deeply that she is willing to pull it apart in public.
She identifies the parts that still breathe, the parts that have calcified and the parts that now cause harm. This becomes clearest in the scene between Astrov and Yelena.
In the original work, the doctor forces himself upon the Professor’s wife. The moment is often softened by tradition, framed as passion or brushed aside as an artefact of its time. This production refuses both evasion and blind fidelity.
It acknowledges the harm of playing the scene exactly as written. It also acknowledges the danger of rewriting history so cleanly that the violence appears never to have existed.
The intervention is brief. Its effect is enormous.
In a few minutes, the production transforms how we understand the scene, the doctor and Chekhov himself. It achieves what pages of academic commentary often cannot. The body on stage makes the argument unavoidable.
During Astrov’s speech about forest destruction, the lush trees behind the stage disappear. The landscape becomes barren. Then it begins to resemble Mount Doom.
Chekhov’s ecological anxiety stretches forward into climate catastrophe. It is the apocalypse as encountered through a phone screen. Terrifying, familiar and always competing with something else.
Yoz’s Vanya carries both the production’s sadness and its mischief. A cast on his arm initially seems like an unavoidable practical detail. This is theatre, however. If there is a cast on stage, it must eventually be used.
The same principle applies to the gun. Chekhov’s weapon appears because it must. Paper Mouth’s version understands the rule and enjoys making us wait for how it will be fulfilled.
Graham’s Sonia has the difficult task of carrying the original play’s emotional conclusion. She performs the early naturalism with stillness and care. That makes the later argument with Chekhov’s ending feel earned.
Dan Thorpe plays Telegin, or Waffles, while also working as sound designer and live pianist. Between scenes, he lightly touches the keys. The piano briefly pulls the scattered room back into focus.
The whole company moves between realism, live art, dance, comedy and deconstruction with remarkable assurance. These performers could deliver a fine, faithful Uncle Vanya. The opening proves it. They also prove why doing only that would be a mistake.
Chekhov leaves Vanya and Sonia at their desks. They will continue working inside the system that has diminished them. They will endure. Perhaps, after death, they will finally rest.
That promise no longer offers much comfort. Work harder. Accept less. Keep the estate running for people who benefit from your labour. Hope another world rewards you. After more than a century of escalating inequality and collapsing systems, endurance begins to sound less like courage than obedience.
Angley offers another possibility. Change the role. Stop the scene. Skip the act. Examine what the system asks of people. Keep what remains alive. Rebuild the rest..
State Theatre Company South Australia Artistic Director Petra Kalive deserves praise for creating the SPARK program and giving this work room to grow. The initiative supports independent South Australian artists through mentoring, rehearsal and performance space, along with access to mainstage production resources.
This is exactly what such a program should do. It does not ask independent artists to make safer work. It gives them the means to become more dangerous.
Every performer on this stage belongs on South Australia’s main stages. You may think you know Uncle Vanya, you may think you know Chekhov. Paper Mouth Theatre presses the yellow button, changes the cast and asks you to look again.
Paper Mouth Theatre presents Uncle Vanya – But There’s ASMR Soap Cutting Videos Playing in the Bottom Right Corner. It runs to 18 July as part of the State Theatre Company South Australia 2026 season. Main Theatre, Adelaide College of the Arts, Adelaide SA 5000.
Tickets are available here.
Website: https://statetheatrecompany.com.au/shows/uncle-vanya/
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/statetheatresa/
Photo credits: Matt Byrne
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