Melbourne Theatre Company’s artistic director, Anne-Louise Sarks, has collaborated with the award-winning playwright Joanna Murray-Smith to restage Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.

The result is a production that boasts all the momentary thrills of an easy laugh at the expense of the rich characterisation and political resonances that made the 1897 play a classic in the first place. It’s Vanya reimagined as a Noël Coward-esque farce, or a 1960s sitcom delivered in front of a live studio audience. The result is laughable to the point of being disheartening.

Melbourne Theatre Company’s Uncle Vanya. Photo © Pia Johnson

This production comes after a string of restagings of Western classics by Sarks that share a dogged commitment to light-hearted positivism and a broadly comic approach to dialogue. It’s an easily recognisable formula. But beneath its well-trodden conventions lie implicit assumptions about our relationship to these tomes of the past worth questioning.

I do not care about fidelity to Chekhov, really. My issue is that these productions – from 2024’s A Streetcar Named Desire to 2025’s Rebecca – imply that the language and characters in these storied texts need to be decontextualised if they are to resonate with modern audiences; they need to be stripped of their geographical and contextual specificity for us to connect with their themes, ideas, and characters.

Must adaptations always associate accessibility with this brand of simplicity? Is Chekhov’s “archaic language,” as Murray-Smith writes in this show’s program notes, a hindrance to our ability to connect with the show or a challenge worth facing head-on?

Must we always believe Australian audiences are so unable to be challenged? Or must MTC always belittle the impact a text can have when it retains all the linguistic, formal, or contextual markers of its time?

Don Bridges and Evelyn Krape in Melbourne Theatre Company’s Uncle Vanya. Photo © Pia Johnson

Picture this: Shaun Micallef, our silver-haired national darling, as the retired Professor and entitled landlord of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, Serebryakov. He’s returned to his country estate to lord over those who have maintained the property without him: his first wife’s friend, the titular Vanya (Daniel Henshall); his first daughter, Sonya (Philippa Northeast); and the local Telyeghin (Don Bridges) and Nanny (Evelyn Krape).

Imagine your landlord staying with you, pretending that you’re friends. Tensions are high. The Professor is up again, resting his leg on an ornate chaise longue (designed with surprising tepidity by Dann Barber) and waking everyone up. He is being tended to by his wife, Yelena (Catherine Văn-Davies), and his daughter, whom he repeatedly belittles and dismisses. In one such moment of misogynistic protest, he turns over to face the corner with a child-like huff.

It’s an easy bit of physical humour worth a giggle, mostly because Micallef is a funny man with good comedic timing. Therein lies the issue that pops up in many forms throughout this show’s two-hour-and-10-minute runtime. I’m not seeing the Professor during this bit, but rather a caricature of him that spotlights Micallef as a performer.

When the lukewarm giggles of a tipsy opening-night audience subsided, I was left with a fairly simple idea of the Professor’s misogyny and a more endearing sense of connection to Micallef. The comedic farce replicated here is not that of Michael Frayn or Lucille Ball but rather The Play That Goes Wrong without the impressive stagecraft.

Daniel Hanshall in Melbourne Theatre Company’s Uncle Vanya. Photo © Pia Johnson

This is not to say that farce or comedy has no place in a Chekhov adaptation. Murray-Smith is right when she observes that Chekhov is often unfairly imagined as simply a brooding Russian existentialist: a stoic humanist staging society’s injustices through characters who make ennui a personality trait. Her aim was to challenge his “sober gravitas” and allow us “to feel just how tragic comedy can be… unrestricted by archaic language.”

There’s that assumption again: that Chekhov’s language restricts us. But I agree with Murray-Smith when she notes, off the back of this point, that Chekhov is not just a master of poetic language but of using the balance between the tragic and comic aspects of living to offer a richer portrait of his characters. It’s his tragicomic characters that reveal the near-existential “foibles” of human nature.

The problem is that Murray-Smith’s approach to writing comedy mirrors a critique that has often been levelled against her playwriting: it renders each character superficial. Like Micallef’s exaggerated and child-like “huff,” our ability to connect with these characters – and, more importantly, to understand how they connect to each other – is too often sacrificed for the sake of an easy punchline.

Uncle Vanya, Sonya, and Yelena each deliver a monologue at different points throughout the show. With this, you can feel Murray-Smith admirably trying to breach the gauzy filter of her style of farce that disconnects us from them as real characters.

But the problem is that these monologues merely represent a solipsistic moment of introspection that underlines her oddly individualistic perspective on the text. In my opinion, Chekhov offers a communal, relational, and inherently social vision of human experience.

What better way to be a failure as a human being, he so often reminds us, than by understanding that your fallibility connects you to your equally fallible mates?

This production attacks characterisation from two sides: it compromises Chekhov’s social humanism by prioritising an individualistic solipsism, and it treats conversations between characters merely as if they were a setup for a punchline.

Some of these conversations manage to feel genuine (moments between Krape and Bridges and Northeast and Văn-Davies stand out in particular). But mostly the show lumbers on from one joke to another, keeping us on the surface of these people and their relationships to each other.

Some of these jokes are funny; most are repetitive. Murray-Smith overshoots the comedy triple by a country mile when the Doctor (Bazzi) jokingly refers to his love of the estate’s surrounding forests for the fifth time. Meanwhile, Sonya (Northeast) repeats the same curt, childlike delivery style ad infinitum. Northeast is good enough that you almost don’t notice how similar each comedic beat or moment of exaggerated physical humour is. Plus, at least there is a dramaturgical reason for Sonya’s ribald immaturity. She’s young. Worse than that: she’s young and in love.

The same cannot be said of the Doctor or Uncle Vanya, who are reduced to one-liners or mean-spirited exaggerations that infantilise them to the point that they feel unbelievable as people.

Melbourne Theatre Company’s Uncle Vanya. Photo © Pia Johnson

When we come to the denouement of Act II, led by Vanya’s climactic breakdown, boredom has taken the place of empathy. Any connection we might have had with these characters has been felled by a misused farce style.

It was genuinely disheartening to see the fallibilities of these characters mined for laughs. In the original play, Chekhov wryly displays these failings so that we may recognise ourselves in them. Here, Vanya’s mediocrity or Sonya’s love-struck absurdities do not reflect our own weaknesses or the shared fallibility that connects us to these characters across time and place. Without the self-reflective turn that might make us see these fallibilities as a reason to feel connected to these characters, we’re just watching stupidity and being encouraged to laugh at it.

You’ll be unsurprised to know that I think it is incredibly rewarding to see the language, context, or people of another time or place hold universal human truths. I remember crying when I first watched Sonya’s final monologue in Uncle Vanya, which ends with a quietly devastating call for hope that is at once optimistic and existential, hopeful and painful. The hope she declares came as if from a far-off place, like an echo that retained all the stops on its journey to me.

It is painful and hopeful in equal measure to connect to the pains, pleasures, and problems of a 20-something Russian woman who exists only in a text from over one hundred years ago. This effect gets stronger when it asks that we navigate difference to attain it; when, for instance, we’re being asked to empathise with someone like Vanya, whom we disagree with in some ways and relate to in others.

It’s too easy to simply laugh our way out of having to face the challenges that this mode of connection asks of us. It’s harder to believe in its value.

Uncle Vanya plays in The Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne, until 22 August.