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“Avant-garde hero? Avant-garde nihilist? Avant-garde a fucking clue, if you ask me!” Gina Moxley hollers abuse at her stage son, Dick Walsh, the Konstantin character in Pan Pan Theatre’s rework of Chekhov’s comedy: Americanitis presents The Seagull and Other Birds. Although the bitter matriarch is to be disdained in this moment, her doubt is peppered over the entire performance – coming from the audience in moments of extreme absurdism, from the cast in their constant metatheatrical questioning, and from Pan Pan themselves in the very construction of such an experimental show. How do we know what to do when we are tasked with the creation of something completely new?

Pan Pan’s answer is a postmodern pastiche of old drama, new commissioned writing, and appropriated cultural artefacts. If someone was to doubt the validity of such an approach – which can at times seem utterly random – Gavin Quinn seeks to reassure us at the opening of the performance by handing out a selection of trophies while the fire exits are pointed out: “Just so you know you’re in safe hands tonight, we are an award-winning company.” As long as you allow yourself to be taken on this maniacal ride, the performance’s search for meaning anywhere from Edward Albee plays to the Happy Mondays will tie itself together for you in its constant hunt for new forms, new ways of engaging an audience, new ways for a group of people to experience something really innovative, really “avant-garde”.

The pressure to do this, and the effects that this has on a person’s life, are the most vibrant themes taken from The Seagull, and the 1895 play’s most salient plot points are easy to pick up through Pan Pan’s vernacular retelling, leaving nobody behind for lack of previous experience. The characters are roughly the same: Moxley as a past-her-prime actress, Walsh as her son of questionable talent, Andrew Bennett as the famed writer, Una McKevitt as the loveless depressive, Samantha Pearl as the bubbling ingénue, and Daniel Reardon as the bumbling uncle of Dick, always at hand to dish out platitudes to the flailing artists around him.

It is when the cast are truest to their Russian origins that the harrowing emotions of the piece expose themselves. Gina – note that the characters retain their real names on-stage – is unflinchingly narcissistic, each moment of her son’s self-destruction ignored as she flaunts her trim physique and superior worldview to the audience. Although Gavin Quinn has Walsh replicate Konstantin’s suicide in a ridiculously over-the-top manner, the moment is still worth some sadness because of the preceding gloom of the mother-son relationship. The final play-within-a-play directly follows this tragedy, seeing the remaining cast line up to face a corner away from the audience, babbling epistemology as they reason away the elephant in the room – the figure of Dick’s “ghost”, literally represented underneath a white sheet that has acted as the stage floor for the rest of the show. This beautifully simplistic piece is a breathtaking way to end the night’s journey.

However, it is not for tugging at heartstrings that this show is remembered. A certain audience member found herself in tears laughing as McKevitt mounted a standing Walsh side-on and the pair began to gyrate to lines from HBO’s Girls – one of the “Other Birds” referenced in the title. Una grunts out Adam’s lines – “You’re a dirty little whore and I’m gonna send you home to your parents covered in cum” – to which Dick squeals: “Oh, don’t do that!” This is just the beginning of a medley of the TV show’s best bits, climaxing in a five-second snippet of the entire cast – who are all clad in tutus and leotards, by the way – pulsating to Icona Pop in the manner of Hannah on cocaine in season two.

Also flabbergastingly entertaining is (again) Una’s rally against the boring kind of alcoholic, the kind of woman who buys two bottles of Pinot Grigio to retreat to her telly for the night, in comparison to her own preference for downing shots and roaring out the lyrics of Minaj’s Boss Ass Bitch – an altogether fitting description for McKevitt’s character. Honourable mentions in the entertainment category also go to Reardon’s delightful dance moves and Bennet’s nihilistic moan delivered in gangster rap: “A thug never be as phat as Joyce or Beckett.”

Americanitis, in all its absurdity, mostly feels more like a question than a fully formed answer, thankfully taking more time to tickle the audience than to “challenge” them. The unceasingly immaculate performances delivered by each cast member allow the play to dive seamlessly into metatheatrical experiment at one moment and perfectly on-point contemporary entertainment the next. Pan Pan have created something really exciting here, and more work similar to Americanitis will be eagerly anticipated.

Read our interview with Americanitis director Gavin Quinn here