Midway through Chekhov's First Play (2015) – a production by the theatre company Dead Centre, inspired by an early, untitled work of Anton Chekhov – a demolition ball suddenly appears and smashes through part of the naturalistic set, a country house interior. A spotlight picks out an audience member, who rises and joins the actors on stage. Modern-day street noises are heard through the audience's headphones, followed by electronic music. A flame is set alight on the demolition ball and the actors perform a synchronised dance to the music. Now, when they speak, they lipsynch to a recording of their own voices.

This juncture marks a shift from a relatively conventional presentation of Chekhov's play, at least with respect to the use of text and the acting style, to something more unpredictable and mysterious. The actors no longer perform Chekhov's play, but rather a text that is more obviously authored by Dead Centre. The world of the play is relocated from nineteenth-century Russia to twenty-first-century Dublin. The recruited audience member is made to represent the hitherto unseen, but much discussed, character of Platonov and given private instruction via (visible) headphones. The stage action takes on a dreamlike, surrealist quality, with inexplicable occurrences, such as a pregnancy dissolving into gushing water. The characters undergo existential crises and out-of-body experiences, their identities ultimately becoming void as the actors remove their costuming. It is all very odd, and, on the face of it, very different to what Chekhov wrote. I remember sitting in the audience at the Battersea Arts Centre in London in October 2018 and feeling giddy and discombobulated as I experienced the performance, particularly the second half. I was caught between trying to follow what was happening, trying to make sense of it all, and being swept up by the dynamism of the performance and its peculiar affective mix of liberation and gloom – a signature Chekhov cocktail, served here with a twist.

Chekhov's First Play could be regarded as a postmodern production, given its ironic deconstruction of Chekhov's text and its playful collage of intertexts, including sources from popular culture (for example, Miley Cyrus's hit single from 2013, ‘Wrecking Ball’, which closes the show) and unannounced quotations from modernist literature (specifically, lines from Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing), but that is not the conceptual frame I will use in this analysis.