WHAT is it with white goods and the West Yorkshire Playhouse interpretation of classic plays?

First, artistic director James Brining plonked a cooker in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, set in the Salem witch trials in 1692/93; now the farmhouse in Anton Chekhov's 1898 Russian work Uncle Vanya has a fridge. Later an overhead projector and a computer make appearances too in associate director Mark Rosenblatt's progressive, pulsating production.

What's striking is how both shows span the ages, being set in their own time and yet with modern accoutrements too. The Crucible had plastic chairs; Uncle Vanya has Dorothea Myer-Bennett's Sonya in jeans and Ryan Kiggell's country doctor Mikhail Astrov talks of "the horses arriving" but the sound of a car's motor accompanies his exit.

Audiences will take this in their stride, growing ever more accustomed to both period rigidity and complete updates making way for echoes down the years.

Particularly significant here in Dick Bird's design is how the woodland takes the bleak, arid form of lines of telegraph polls with rows of lamps between them. When a storm breaks, the water falls as if from a single shower. You could not call this imagery Magritte-like surrealism, more a heightened realism to match the inertia.

Time is marching on around David Ganly's exasperated, enervated Vanva, a decent man who is caring yet caustic, waspishly witty, but a loser at a loss after 25 years of selfless graft on the family estate.

The electric spark here is Samuel Adamson's new adaptation that plays true to the sly, dark humour, melancholia and pathos in Chekhov's tragi-comedy while infusing it with a modern-day zest, such as the term "diddly-squat".

Frustratingly, the audience are slow to pick up on how cruelly funny this production is. Their reaction is seemingly as stuck in a rut as Vanya and Yelena (Georgina Rylance), the beautiful, bored, indolent young second wife of Serebryakov (John Bett), the self-regarding professor with a townie's lack of understanding of country matters and family estates.

Uncle Vanya's themes rattle down the tracks of time. Amid blunted ambitions, people make fools of themselves in matters of the heart as Vanya forlornly makes a play for Yelena, while the professor's plain daughter, farm manager Sonya is consumed by her yearning, unrequited love for Astrov, who in turn has a thirst for Yelena and drink alike.

Farms are a perennial headache: Vanya and Sonia toil to no appreciation; the unfeeling, egotistical art professor wants to sell; no-one listens to the articulate visionary Astrov's green plans, despite the inevitability of change (perhaps represented by the shadowy figures tapping on the poles).

Above all, families irritate the hell out of each other, forever making the next cup of tea to avoid the bigger issues.

Gradually, the sad humanity of it all takes over, and we are struck again by how Chekhov's "scenes from a country life" are as resonant as ever in this age of ridiculously cheap milk turning village life sour for already struggling farmers.

Uncle Vanya, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until March 21. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or wyp.org.uk