Mary Angley was living in a regional town in 2024, working as high school drama teacher when conditions on the ground sent her back to the classics.

“There was no Wi-Fi,” Angley explains to InReview as she ducks out of a rehearsal room.

“So I brought plays with me that I had been meaning to read for a while – the first one I picked up was Uncle Vanya, and I was immediately shook by how good it was. I was like, ‘Oh, this is really funny.”

The 30-year-old writer, director and performer is aware the realisation that this long-dead Russian playwright and his endlessly staged suite of classics might not only be good, but perhaps even relevant, is not an original take.

After all, Simon Stone’s South Korean twist on The Cherry Orchard headlined this year’s Adelaide Festival, just months after Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre ran its own modern update. In July, Melbourne Theatre Company will mount a mainstage production of Uncle Vanya adapted by Julia playwright Joanna Murray-Smith.

Angley floats Chekhov’s mix of dry humour and existential dread as a reason for his enduring appeal – especially in an era of short attention spans and second-screen viewing, where theatremakers battle to wean audiences off streaming content designed to be watched while doomscrolling.

“Life is really fucked, but you gotta laugh!” Angley says. “I think that resonates with what’s going on today.”

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By the time of her Wake-in-Vanya moment, Angley’s indie production company Paper Mouth Theatre had already spent years making new work around Adelaide and Melbourne, often smashing together older texts with the high-contrast sensibilities of a digital native.

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Angley’s Hedda GablerGablerGabler gamified Ibsen’s 1891 play into a nightly contest between three actors to claim the title role. The 2021 solo show Grief Lightning: A Satire in 78 Slides embraced Powerpoint to riff on an obscure fan theory that Sandy in Grease was in a coma the whole time. Most recently, You’re All Invited to My Son Samuel’s Fourth Birthday Party pitted childhood nostalgia against the dread of climate change.

Those productions, Angley says, all played with the tensions between “high-brow and low-brow”, balancing moments of “profound truth” with “rip-your-soul-out emotions”.

As she turned the pages of Uncle Vanya, Angley also turned to a group chat of friends and regular collaborators like actors Yoz Mensch (whose hit Fringe show My Grandpa Doesn’t Follow Me On Instagram Angley directed), Lucy Haas, Poppy Mee and composer Dan Thorpe, to swap notes about how they might tackle Vanya.

"The phrase that we keep repeating in the rehearsal room is that we’re not dumbing it down, we’re lifting it up."

Later, when State Theatre Company South Australia issued a callout for new local productions to participate in its Spark program, the group chat manifested at Angley’s house to flesh out their pitch IRL.

Angley says that one of the early “provocations” for the team was to sit and read through Uncle Vanya together, taking notes every time their mind drifted.

“If you had the urge to go on your phone, what did you want to look at?” she explains.

“It’s a really nice framework for just asking yourself, ‘How much dopamine can we wring out of this play?’ But at the same time, not just imposing it [on the play]. The craft of it has to come from, ‘Where can we enhance Chekhov’s text?’ The phrase that we keep repeating in the rehearsal room is that we’re not dumbing it down, we’re lifting it up.”

Their show, Uncle Vanya – but there’s ASMR soap cutting videos playing in the bottom right corner, folds those mental digressions and runaway thought-trains into the text, punctuating Chekhov’s original with references to wrestling culture, dance routines, and the world of ASMR videos.

State Theatre Company artistic director Petra Kalive tells InReview she was struck by the group’s confidence, and a pitch that felt “artistically risky in the best way”.

“There’s a real joy in how playful they are with form, yet beneath that experimentation sits genuine rigour and attention to detail,” Kalive explains. “I could feel their unbridled enthusiasm, but also deep thinking about how the themes and ideas in this work would resonate with a younger audience today, and why it matters now.”

Kalive is proud to support a group that “have been making powerful work for years without the backing of a major institution”. “My secret hunch is that our audiences will be able to say in 10 years, when Paper Mouth Theatre are traveling the world jumping from festival to festival, ‘I saw them first at State Theatre Company and it was amazing’.”

Angley aspires to do more than pander to audiences’ attention spans – or their own.

“We’ve been finding a lot of depth in it,” Angley explains. “We’re really into this idea of the show being a dialectic; you can think of it as this sort of ‘Wow-hedonism-dopamine-rush-rush-rush-adrenaline-all-the-fun-stuff-having-a-good-time-in-the-theatre’, or you can be like, ‘Wow, it’s kind of messed up that this is what was necessary for us to keep ourselves engaged with the play’.”

In some ways, Angley says, the chaotic layers-within-layers are true to the spirit of Chekhov – even if Uncle Vanya might never have been written had its original author gained access to a TikTok feed.

“I think there’s definitely something to be said about why we keep returning to the classics. Is it lazy to just keep going and do a modern adaptation of a classic play?

“But the more time I spend with this play, the connections we’re finding to the current moment have been really, really exciting. It’s his comment on adaptation and the need to keep changing things – and why do we feel the need to hang on to these texts? Why aren’t we writing new ones?”

Uncle Vanya – but there’s ASMR soap cutting videos playing in the bottom right corner runs from July 9 – 18 at Adelaide College of the Arts