Uncle Vanya - but there’s ASMR soap cutting videos playing in the bottom right corner at State Theatre Company South Australia

What begins as a faithful production of Chekhov’s poignant, pastoral play, spirals into a meticulously crafted chaos engine — testing the limits of sincerity, concentration, and collective theatrical endurance.

In this deliriously overstimulating remix, Chekhovian despair is dragged kicking and screaming into our current attention economy. This genre-bending, gender-bending live performance collides classically constructed text with a riot of media interference — TikTok dances, puppet shows, and pro-wrestling smackdowns.

This Uncle Vanya is part experiment, part tragic farce, part viral hallucination. The interventions don’t mock the source text; they refract it — not dumbing it down, but hoisting it up.

A requiem for the naturalistic slow-burn. A eulogy for attention spans. An unruly, heartfelt act of theatrical resistance.