select publication to read review:	> The Times > The List > The Scotsman > The British Theatre Guide > The Stage	> Financial Times > The Herald > ScotsGay > Time Out	> The Guardian > The Metro > The Independent > Newstatesman
Switch Triptych The Times 8.9.2005 Robert Dawson Scott	Adriano Shaplin’s plays for his Riot Group company from New York now come with a published text which is a measure of how far they have come since a sharp-eyed reviewer for the Scotsman unearthed them above a garage back in 1998. Just as well, some ongoing practical problems with Shaplin’s own otherwise striking production of his latest play make it quite difficult to hear at times even from the 10th row. Some of these problems arise from the nature of the piece, set in a 19919 New York telephone exchange with overheard dialogue on tinny headphones. Some directorial decisions, such as having the main character facing entirely upstage for a substantial section, do not help. By the time you read this, they may well have been resolved, which would push the rating up a notch.	For on the page, the script looks as sharp and pointed as ever. It is the moments that changes largely, women operated affairs go automatic. Shaplin takes the opportunity to tilt at several issues including women empowering themselves, early trade union activity in the United States (the new trainee turns out to be a union representative) the strengths and weaknesses of immigrant communities and even a whiff of sectarianism.	Still using his characteristic quickfire, layered dialogue where several things are always happening at once, this is nevertheless a big development for Shaplin, a 90-minute period piece with a cast of five, including two outsiders. But core group member Stephanie Viola still catches the eye in the central role of Lucille, an Italian black widow who rules the roost with a cynical but brittle toughness. > return to top
Switch Tryptych The List 10.8.2005 Steve Cramer	The clash between spirituality and capitalism is one that lurks equally beneath the neo conservative revivalist right of the United States and its semi-mythic opponents in the Islamic world. But it’s most obvious in the dollar-driven churches of the former. Timely, then, that the splendid Riot Group should make their latest appearance at the Fringe with a piece that interrogates the issue of faith and worldly corruption. It also raises questions about technology and what we unquestioningly call progress which might resonate strongly through our blue-chip age.	Adriano Shaplin’s production of his own play sees five disparate characters at a New York telephone exchange in a deliberately anachronistic 1919. They bicker away, revealing a succession of belief structures and creed to sustain them through the reifying process of a burgeoning corporate economy. The manager (Paul Schnabel) has signed the pledge, and is battling alcoholism on the verge of prohibition. His assistant has signed away his soul for the corporation, and seeks only promotion. Then there are the telephonists, Pippa (Sarah Sanford), a woman simply intent on surviving New York, a new British trainee (Cassandra Friend), who turns out to be dedicated to unionizing the workforce, and at the center of it all, Lucille (Stephanie Viola), a women who has adapted her Italian Catholicism to eccentric purposes in order to incorporate the corruption of her world. All are threatened by redundancy by new technology, and each pursues a strategy of survival in a hostile environment.	This gives you the story, but as ever with the Riot Group, it’s really all about the style. Shaplin’s crisply aphoristic text leaps from one profound, complete and witty observation to the next. The strange poetic style of the language creates the perfect distance from which to view the play’s issues, while the insistent, discordant electric piano score punctuates the rhythm like a broken metronome, pushing and pacing the stage action. This, in front of a metallic, cage-like set, is visually very striking, creating tableaux after tableaux, driving us away from naturalism and into other, more lucid, realms of thought. There are some inaudible lines, a shame for such a strong text, but ultimately, this ingenious piece asks us what we think progress is, and why we feel we need it. It also asks about spirituality in a profoundly self-reflexive world, and queries individualism against collective beliefs. It never preaches, but provokes, and set off by a universally splendid cast, should be a very hot ticket. > return to top
Switch Triptych The Scotsman 11.8.2005 Joyce McMillan	The Riot Group’s radicalism, by contrast, famously comes in a more overtly political form and house playwright Adriano Shaplin’s latest text for the company is another thrilling and challenging piece of politically driven dramatic poetry set this time in a New York telephone exchange in 1919 in the year when Bell Atlantic began to replace live female operators with an automatic system. Shaplin uses this early and iconic example of the replacement of human flesh with technology to explore a tense mix of dialogue and monologue how the intense individualism of American culture—dazzlingly represented by the hard-drinking, fast-talking Italian-American chief operator, Lucille—both liberates the human spirit I unique and thrilling ways and desperately limits the capacity to acknowledge the deep vulnerability of human beings, soft flesh, the relative inefficiency and the occasional need for solidarity and help.	Switch Triptych could hardly be more different from The Devil’s Larder in style. It’s both spectacular and static, set on an obliquely lit stage dominated by the rusting metallic presence of three huge old-fashioned telephone exchange machines. It uses heavily amplified sound, not always clearly audible in the terrible acoustic of the Assembly Rooms ballroom, to catch the scratchy intonation of old-fashioned telephone talk and the five-strong company, although their performances are superb in outline, don’t yet seem in total command of Shaplin’s complex text.	But in their defense of the unpredictable, fleshy human being against the advance of machine civilization, these two shows find a strange point of contact. And, as for the objection that these stage figures are more like mouthpieces than characters—well Shaplin is an uncompromising stage poet in the tradition of Ben Jonson and Brecht, rather than Ibsen and Chekov and, in any healthy theatre culture, that’s allowed. > return to top
Switch Tryptych The British Theatre Guide 20.9.2005 Philip Fisher	Switch Triptych is one of the first Edinburgh shows of 2005 to transfer to London. It comes with a good recommendation, having won a Fringe First at the start of the festival. Its real strength is in Adriano Shaplin’s remarkable writing which is delivered at machine gun pace by a cast of five. The action takes place in a New York telephone exchange at a historical cusp in 1919. This is run along unorthodox lines as alcohol is liberally splashed around as calls are answered and, in order to gat a job, the female recruits are measured (literally) by a manager using the diligence of a tailor. The office character is Lucille, a mouthy Italian-American who dresses in widow’s weeds, although all indications are that these may be an affectation. Swilling wine and hooch, she rails against anything and everything with poetic glee in two different languages. Stephanie Viola delivers several gloriously rapid monologues that subtly uncover the pressures that multicultural New York faces with its numerous fighting religions and peoples. Her foil is Sarah Sanford’s quiet Philippa, easily led and squiffy on no more than a sniff of bootleg gin.	The pair operate the switchboards as well as a racket that brings in much-needed cash by offering the customers to businessmen. They also play merry hell with their two touchy male supervisors, played by Paul Schnabel and Drew Friedman. Anarchy is in the air from two different sources. A new employee has arrived, Englishwoman June, played by Cassandra Friend. She may seem innocent but in the denouement, she proves to be almost as much of a handful as Lucille and delivers a strong final monologue. More threatening is the Strowger, an automated switchboard that looks like a flying saucer but will ultimately take away all of their jobs.	Switch Triptych somehow has greater immediacy in the more intimate and narrow space at Soho than it had at the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh. The language is often dazzling and highly thought-provoking though it can pass you by if you drop your guard for even a few seconds, such is the pacing. The primary theme of the play is the way in which mankind has been subjugated to machinery throughout the 20th century and beyond. Not far behind is the subjugation of women and their ability to fight back. The other ideas underlying the play are manifold and, even on two viewings, some are not completely clear. In many ways, this does not matter as the pleasure of the play is in the performance, Shaplin’s meticulous direction and the way in which his poetry throws light on so many sociological and technical developments during the last 85 years. > return to top
Switch Tryptych The Stage 25.9.2005 Thom Dibdin	Stark and minimal, Jim Findlay’s design for the Riot Group, lit by William Cusick, echoes the manner if not the structure, of Adriano Shaplin’s direction of his own play. Thin, end-on cages mark the exchange of a New York telephone company in 1919, where three operators are putting through the calls. It looks good but it’s hard to see exactly what it is and quite how the occasional piece of lush costume actually fits in.	Three trios dominate in the play. The operators are Stephanie Viola’s sharp drunk Lucille, who seems to run the show, Sarah Sanford’s hard working Philippa and Cassandra Friend’s union rep June, who is infiltrating the boards. The bosses are Drew Friedman’s Andrew, pawing and abusing new operator June, Paul Schnabel’s tired but still proper Truman, time served and doing his job, and the unseen bosses upstairs.	It is the trio of labour, unions and company that which this ends up being about, however. And a point through new technology, the balance tips from the workers scamming to the company exploiting while organized labour tries to help, is in vain. Wonderful though it is to see such a talented ensemble working together, Shaplin’s meaning is obscure and the result messy. > return to top
Switch Tryptych Financial Times 12.9.2005 Ian Shuttleworth	Writer/director Adriano Shaplin and his company the Riot Group find themselves experiencing a backlash of modest proportions this year. After building a deserved reputation for intense pieces such as Victory at the Dirt Palace and Pugilist Specialist, stage in small spaces that the material made seem even more claustrophobic (this is a compliment), the Berkeley-based group find themselves promoted to Assembly’s second-largest space, the Ballroom. It’s a combination that exposes the limitations of Shaplin’s writing and staging. This is the company’s first period piece, set in a New York telephone exchange in 1919, at the moment when automation is about to replace live switchboard operators. The supervisors and the women on the jacks boards banter and tussle in various permutations, as a union activist raises in vain the option of organized collective action. There’s also some play about the particular Americanness of various values, as the Italian-American chief operator squares up to her Boston-Irish colleagues down the line and the English trade-unionist on the board next to her.	This kind of investigation of the axioms of American character, and the conflicts between individuality and the collective impulse, are Shaplin’s stock and trade; likewise the mode in which he explores them, which is that of multi-vectored power-play, a never-ending series of contests for dominance. In this respect, and his high-powered, densely declamatory style of writing, Switch Triptych maintains his reputation without advancing it; inevitably there’s a feeling that to stand still is to fall behind.	The machine-gun patter of Shaplin’s writing and in particular of Stephanie Viola’s performance as queen-bee switch woman Lucille are often at odds with the reverberation-heavy acoustics of the Ballroom. Add in dialogue exchanges (no pun intended) that are relayed over trebly speakers, and speeches delivered when facing upstage, and the result is that chunks of the material are often unintelligible. In terms both of adventurousness and the brute problems posed by their venue, the Riot Group would be advised to broaden their stylistic palette. > return to top
Switch Tryptych The Herald 12.9.2005	The Riot Group were one of the first companies off the block to combine political content with a post-modern approach. Their scabrous meditations on American affairs performed in a static but breathless style under the directorial guidance of writer Adriano Shaplin were a series of dramatic rabbit punches at odds with other fare.	In apparent contrast, this 1919-set history play concerns a trio of switchboard operators about to be hung up on as the communication age zips into the future. What emerges beyond the torrent of words (some of which are lost to the Music Hall’s woeful acoustics) is an exploration of cultural identity and self-preservation in a sorority-like environment where defending one’s territory means survival. Shaplin has also created an elegy of sorts to a life as dim and distant now as the pre-railroads wild west.	While there’s nothing new going on, Switch Triptych recalls some of the work New York’s pop-art cut-up merchants The Wooster Group were exploring more than 20 years ago—Shaplin’s wordily florid, free associative approach has an urgency coursing through it. But whether it amounts to anything beyond that is debatable. > return to top
Switch Tryptych ScotsGay 20.9.2005	This is probably the only publication reviewing the Fringe whose Editor used to have a fully functioning Strowger telephone exchange standing in his hall, so this story about the mechanization of phones had an extra interest for me. I remember the Riot Group playing in the Garage’s second space, which held about 20. This was staged in the Assembly’s Ballroom, one of the largest Fringe venues. However, that wasn’t the only thing about this show that was larger, from the set to the breadth of issues covered it was bigger. Like all Riot Group shows the words are delivered at a fierce rate of knots and there is so much delivered that I expect many will see the play in different ways. One problem was that some of it is delivered over headsets with the actors facing away from the audience and the PA system was not up to it.	The action takes place in a 1919 New York manual phone exchange on the eve of automation but it could just as easily be set in the 1990’s as lots of jobs were replaced by call centers or in 2005 when call centers are outsourced to India. Initially I couldn’t see where it was going but I think we were just meant to dislike the characters. About halfway through it came alive as we begin to understand them as fallible human beings. We all have our down sides but we are all people and if we forget that we all lose. It goes on to discuss the nature of progress and the treatment of capitalism as religion.	Over 30 years ago Ted Heath condemned a company as “an unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism", I doubt any politician would dare to utter such words today about a lawful yet wrong behavior. It is to the author Adriano Shaplin’s credit that as ever he is prepared to challenge orthodoxy. However he covers the individual as opposed to the organization, how we relate to each other, and a bit of sexual and industrial politics as well. And this is my main problem with it, I think he tries to cover too much. However this is a major play well worth seeing. Some shows you see and forget, some you sort of say “yes", and some you see and you just can’t forget and keep going back to and thinking about them. This is definitely in the last category. Initially I thought my star rating might have been too generous. I now think it may have been too mean. > return to top
Switch Tryptych Time Out London. 8.13.2003. Brian Logan.	The Riot Group has established its considerable reputation these past few years with scalpel-sharp, ultra-modern satires on American public life. ‘Switch Triptych’ changes the setting, if not the style. It transports us to a New York telephone exchange in 1919. There we meet switchboard queen Lucille, her sappy sidekick Pippa, and their ineffectual superiors, Andrew and T ruman. Lucille radiates the kind of epic self-satisfaction to which writer Adriano Shaplin’s characters (and indeed Shaplin himself) are often prone. But today, that smugness is punctured, and her job jeopardized, by the introduction of an all-new, automated switchboard machine.	Refocusing their attention from the topical concerns of ‘Victory at the Dirt Palace’ and ‘Pugilist Specialist’, the Riot Group has lost much of its urgency. The replacement of human labour by machines remains a pertinent subject. But ‘Switch Triptych’ has little revealing to tell us about it. While Shaplin uses the Bell Atlantic telephone exchange to exemplify the phenomenon is anyone’s guess- the workplace he presents is so bitchy and joyless, it’s hard to mourn its passing. The play’s long first scene comprises the loudmouthed Lucille shooting her mouth off and not much else- and even Shaplin’s characteristically super-smart writing can’t redeem the sense of directionlessness that soon kicks in.	Once its mechanization theme is finally introduced, ‘Switch Triptych’ alludes to the contradiction between America’s religiosity and its rampant individualism, as English union rep June is shunned by the locals. Meanwhile, Truaman’s historically ironic assurances (it’ll fail, people want to talk to other people’) connect with precisely nobody. The play too, as its inconclusive second act unfolds to an ambient soundtrack of beeps and crackles, may experience a similar problem. > return to top
Switch Tryptych The Guardian 8. 9. 2005 Maddy Costa	It’s easy to see why the Riot Group has made such a splash at the Fringe in past years: its plays, written by co-founder Adriano Shaplin, are written by a bracing intellect, which can feel like a rare commodity here. This year’s offering recalls the moment when the US discovered technology; when gossiping flirting switchboard operators were replaced by automated telephone systems, rendering these people—and by implication, humanity—redundant.	This is undeniably a moment in history laden with pathos. The play is set in 1919, and we can see in the treatment of its three female operators the seeds of the boom of the 1920s, as corporations exploited the means to unprecedented wealth, and also the depression that would follow. The trouble is that Shaplin doesn’t so much work on his audience’s emotions as bully them.	In the contest between Lucille, a sharp-mouthed Italian immigrant who thinks of herself as the archetypal tough American, and June, an English-woman determined to fight the new regime through the union, Shaplin presents not characters but mouthpieces. And what they tell us—that New York is a fierce town and that Americans are disturbingly suspicious of ogranised labour—is hardly new enough to justify our being hectored. > return to top
Switch Tryptych The Metro 9.9.2005 Claire Allfree	The Riot Group has seized upon an interesting period in the history of telecommunications: the old telephone exchanges in New York, which were invariably operated entirely by women. Their new show is set in one such exchange in 1919—at the dawn of Prohibition but also at the dawn of the new automated exchanges, which are about to make the girls redundant. Lucille and Phillippa have steadfastly refused to join a union, unlike their loathed Irish sisters in the Boston exchange, and even when a union representative, June, tries to mobilise them, they collapse into drunken chaos rather than unite in protest. This much-admired American theatre company examines several big ideas with customary intelligence here: the costs and benefits of technological progress, the strategies necessary for survival in a capitalist economy, and, most interestingly of all, the notion of female solidarity itself.	The drama in a Riot Group show lies in Adriano Shaplin’s tense, super-articulate writing rather than what happens on stage. There is little movement in Switch Triptych. Characters are rigid and tend to speak directly to the audience rather than to each other. Yet, while the company has used this technique to great effect in previous shows, here it makes for very dry theatre.	Lucille’s highly charged speeches, often delivered too quickly by Stephanie Viola, are relentless and exhausting, sucking up energy, and, in the first act in particular, giving little back. By the end, her anarchy has become a religious protest—a Catholic rebel in a Protestant capitalist system—yet, as a character, she is ultimately frustratingly convoluted. Switch Triptych is packed with stimulating ideas but struggles to find a stimulating theatrical language. > return to top
Switch Tryptych The Independent 9. 10. 2005 Lynn Walker	Phones ring back in time to 1919 in Switch Triptych. Three New York switchboard operators are unable to connect to much, least of all the idea that advancing technology spells redundancy. Adriano Shaplin’s latest creation for the Riot Group is a torrent of words dictated, somewhat soullessly, into a barren acoustic kaleidoscope. The three “hello" girls, the mouth one lapsing into Italian (which add to the general tangle of verbiage and repetitive underscoring), work the exchange board of the Bell Atlantic telephone company under the supervision of their “wire chiefs".	The empowerment of female workers, the early stirrings of trades-union activity and the competition between immigrant and native communities are compressed into a torrent of quickfire exchanges. Central to this is a kind of running commentary from the mouth, inebriated, Italo-America, Lucille. But, it’s played in such a curious way by Stephanie Viola that it becomes tiresome trying to follow her tangents.	Sparks fly, but there’s too much tinny telephonic talkback and too many obscure extension-leads for the word-driven content of the play to make a clear connection. There are 21 common complaint codes in the Bell Atlantic manual. Bad connections (“BCN") and bells don’t ring (“BDR") are the most relevant ones for this play. > return to top
Switch Tryptych Newstatesman 10. 19. 2005	“He died with the hammer in his hand.” The words of “The Ballad of John Henry”, which I haven’t heard since childhood, have just come back to me. The legendary 19th century railroad builder raced against the new fangled steam hammer that threatened to supplant his labour. He won, but it cost him his life. In Switch Triptych, Adriano Shaplin’s anti-heroine Lucille is a switchboard operator who tries desperately to handle more calls than the automatic switching machine that Bell Atlantic management has introduced. Set in New York in 1919, the play follows three female operators and their two male managers in the hours before automation renders the women redundant. June, the union representative, arrives to urge solidarity and to organise a walkout, but to no avail. Shaplin’s message is not as sentimental as it first appears. The women he creates are hardly symbols of working-class nobility. Lucille drinks champagne and every other concoction known to womankind and descends into alcoholism. Her rule is no drinks before 6pm, so 7:40am is fine. She has reduces her fellow operators to servitude, and uner her tutelage a younger operator, Phillipa (played by Sarah Sanford), sprawls inebriated on the floor of the exchange. Lucille is a New York celebrity by virtue of the influence she wields. She runs a racket which is a kind of variant on the Yellow Pages. Callers looking for a plumber or undertaker are connected with businesses that pay Lucille bribes. Until she starts frenetically tugging at the wires in the showdown with the new machine, the only call she has condescended to handle was a corrupt client haggling over her rates.	Even if Lucille and her platoon were less selfish, June’s speeches would ring hollow. The union has nothing to offer but resistance to technological advance. The tide of progress is unstoppable (a point that Peter Mandelson, with his import quotas, should note). June’s speeches are based on a text by Norman Mailer, who wrote in The Armies of the Night: “Nothing is more intrinsically opposed to technology than the bleeding heart of Christ.” June asks: “What kind of Christian worships at the feet of a corporation?” But Shaplin complicates the message because he shows us the greed only of the workers, not the company. Lucille is not worried about losing her job. A girl like that will never go without. But the new switchboard will end her racket. Nor does Shaplin produce stereotypical managers. Truman and Andrew (Paul Schnabel and Drew Friedman) are useless, humourless, and mildly lascivious. Keeping off drink and playing the horses are more on their minds than the health of Bell Atlantic. They are poor capitalist lackeys who allow the workforce to drink away the shift. Switch Triptych is written like muscular poetry. It is rich in rhythm, repetition and alliteration. But, under the direction of Shaplin, the managers speak like auotmata, delivering lines in a staccato manner that robs them of meaning. As the play advances, all the characters begin to yell, approaching hysteria. During much of the second act, electronic gongs sound loudly and repetitively, marking the rhythm of the text, and providing the crescendo towards the duel between woman and machine. The din drives the audience almost to insanity. There are more empty seats in the auditorium than at the start. Stephanie Viola dominates the performance as Lucille. This tyrant of the telephone exchange oozes contempt. She is a starlet to whom men and women pay homage. Her earnings and status have liberated her from a drunken husband, freeing her to booze and flirt. As her monologues meander around matters of religion, they border on both obscenity and blasphemy. Did Shaplin perhaps draw inspiration from Madonna?	Lucille lives in a world of fantasy and alcohol-induces tableaux, largely indifferent to the real world and other people, except that, as an Italian America, she disdains the Irish and loathes the Protestants (both pints of historic interest). It seemed to me jarring to write June as an Englishwoman. I understand the strength of the English Christian socialism in the early 20th century, but she seems an unlikely figure to rally the workers. The jokes around her Englishness are not bad (“You from Britain or just England?”), but the character made little sense. Since 1999, the Riot Group theater company has won four Scotsman Fringe First awards at the Edinburgh Festival with Shaplin plays. On this occasion, it seems to have missed the mark. When I saw the play in London, the curtain fell to lukewarm applause. As a text, Switch Triptych repays reading. As a stage play, it fails. > return to top