Uncle Vanya etc ~ SPARK (State Theate Company) ~ Review

Uncle Vanya – but there’s ASMR soap cutting videos playing in the bottom right corner

SPARK/State Theatre Company
Adelaide College of the Arts
Sat 11 July, 2026

When rock videos were new on the scene people used to try and work out the symbolic connections between the song lyrics and the visual images. Sometimes those metaphorical connections were obvious, sometimes tenuous, and sometimes non-existent, and it was difficult to be sure of any of it. So it was with this version of Chekhov’s famous play. It was a lot to take in, a lot to digest, and some of it could be safely discarded as good-natured silliness. But it was certainly entertaining, and yes – it made Chekhov fun – and that is no mean feat.

SPARK is a development arm of the State Theatre Company. Its purpose is to encourage and support original, independent South Australian theatre. And there was plenty of originality on show in this bizarre offering.

Uncle Vanya etc was billed as a production for modern audiences who’ve had their attention spans ruined by the swill of social media. In this it was enormously successful. The audience had the option of stopping any pieces of dialogue considered too long, An awful, but very funny PowerPoint presentation was used to summarise some of the less interesting parts of the play without having to sit through them. This sped things up a great deal and made the whole play shorter and less demanding for the cognitively challenged.

A quiz at interval with prizes on offer helped to keep the audience from leaving before act 3 – smart thinking!

And just in case you were contemplating how well an individual actor was playing their character, most people changed character, and gender, at least once during the show.

Several more innovative approaches were employed to alleviate any risk of boredom, but best you see the show for yourself to find out what they are. You won’t regret it. Unless you’re a serious Chekhov purist in which case you might find the whole thing offensive and trivial.

Ironically, tedium and the nature of life being something to endure are themes central to the original Uncle Vanya, and they are in this production too. But in this production the tedium is regularly interrupted by hilarity.

Contrary to what one might expect, apparently Anton Chekhov was quite an entertaining and humorous fellow in his personal life. If so, I think he’d enjoy this but he may need to have the various media used explained to him.

Wonderfully entertaining risk-taking theatre!

Directed Mary Angley

This review also published on The Clothesline.