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Victory at the Dirt Palace. Scotland on Sunday. 8.11.2002. Mark Brown.	Although the lion's share of the September 11-related attention will go to Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins' performances in The Guys, that theatrical blockbuster will be doing well to surpass the intelligence, bleak humour and dramatic power of the Riot Group's Victory at the Dirt Palace. With their 1999 Fringe First-winning Wreck the Airline Barrier already receiving the compliment of a festival cover version, the avant-garde American collective return to form with this excoriating take on the US news media in a time of perpetual war.	Father and daughter James and K Mann are rival 'hard news' anchors as New York is struck by terror attacks. Cleverly weaving Shakespeare's King Lear into the fabric of an American mass media which seems all but immune to satire, the piece develops into an undeniable combination of potently politicized dialogue and full force acting. In these days of the NBC 'Hardball Debate', American news networks might be said to have moved voluntarily into an era of self-parody. Nonetheless, the Riot Group have found a brilliantly observed space for satire in the familial ratings war, in which self-seeking, sexually devious advisors help the rival Manns find the cynically heavy platitude to fit the moment.	As with Wreck, many of the finest points come in the midst of the driest surrealism. K's announcement that she is "picking out underwear for the broadcast" is as sharply telling as the "object permanence tests" which both protagonists undergo. This is an alternative world, a media bubble in which the star-spangled navel becomes a very profound place indeed. From stinging start to darkly hilarious conclusion, this is a penetratingly written object lesson in ensemble theatre making. If George W's rhetoric of "good guys" versus "evil-doers" seems sinisterly thin, Victory at the Dirt Palace is the theatrical antidote. > return to top
Victory at the Dirt Palace. Sunday Herald. 8.11.2002. Tim Abrahams.	The Riot Group are Edinburgh regulars now. Their play Wreck The Airline Barrier was a critical success in 1999, and while that show has gone on to be performed by Oxford University students at this year's Fringe, the company are still performing in the same small room at the Garage. It's a venue that contributes to the intensity of Victory at the Dirt Palace, which focuses on family relations in US TV stations.	The traumatic events in America last year are more of a backdrop to the piece than its subject, and the atmosphere is rendered even more surreal by frequent references to King Lear.	Written by company member Adriano Shaplin, it is a brutal and cynical satire matched only by the company's electric style of confrontational performance. > return to top
Victory at the Dirt Palace. Scotsman. 8.15.2004. Joyce McMillan	For at least a century, the media have been known as the Fourth Estate, one of the great powers in the realm; but still, when theatre companies look for a new take on Shakespeare's great political tragedies, they tend to set them around governments and rulers rather than newsrooms and editors. Until now, that is. The fast, loud and brilliant Riot Group, of New York, return to the Garage this year with a blistering show loosely based on the father-daughter conflict of Shakespeare's King Lear (the programme informs us that the play contains exactly 103 words borrowed from Shakespeare) and is set in the television news studios of two competing United States networks on the night of an 11 September-style attack.	The father, fronting the news for one network, is ageing liberal journalist James Mann, "the most trusted man in America". The daughter, K Mann, has just been promoted to news anchor for the opposition. Together with their two sidekick producers Ð including K Mann's bullying and bullied husband Spence, who is partial to a spot of sexual strangulation to get his adrenaline flowing before the show goes on air Ð they run the gamut of ruthless and exploitative media attitudes to the human tragedy that is the news. Both are driven by the insane levels of competitiveness and aggression that pass for normal in the media, but K Mann Ð Regan, Goneril and Cordelia rolled into one Ð outstrips her father for sheer hungry ambition and quickness in grasping that patriotic bullshit has become the order of the day.	There's a sense that having set up the situation, Adriano Shaplin's script doesn't quite know what to do with it, veering from the surreal to the grotesque; and this big, loud show is absurdly cramped and confined in the tiny Garage Studio. But Paul Schnabel and Stephanie Viola give terrific, red-hot, flawless performances as father and daughter, with Shaplin and Drew Friedman in support, and it's refreshing to see at least one company on the Fringe that, instead of sitting around whining about the unaccountable power of the media, stands up and gives the whole arrogant industry a smack in the mouth. > return to top
Victory at the Dirt Palace. The List. 8.15.2004. Steve Cramer.	The Riot Group is back to its best this Fringe with a dark and powerful satire uttered in a unique voice. In Victory a father and daughter occupy rival news anchor positions in two US broadcasting corporations. When her timeslot is moved into a ratings clash with his, there are explosions of petty vanity and ego. Each of the two has an assistant (and in her case, partner) intent upon introducing them, and the scheming makes for an intense watch.	The tight, clammy space of the Garage upstairs studio suits the Rioteers to a tee, for in close proximity there is little escape from this unscrupulous bunch of shysters, nor from the driving, insistent music of the piece, as it resolves itself, complete with the odd verbatim quote, into a King Lear for a contemporary media culture. Meanwhile, a succession of striking phrases with jagged edges, like 'kiss a dirty kitten' an insult derived from a credit card fraud committed early on, recur rhythmically through the text to up the ante, creating an increasing tension towards the play's denouement.	The startling finale is very cleverly accomplished, and the play's gender politics bring a fresh perspective to King Lear itself, already a play with a fascinating subtext about sex, power and gender. The performances are taut and gifted, and the play, despite slight overlength, holds the attention from end to end. > return to top
Victory at the Dirt Palace. The Stage. 8.15.2002. Nick Awde.	James and K are news anchors on opposing TV stations and when they are not reading the autocues, they are feeding a bitter rivalry aided and abetted by slimy PAs whose parasitic power grows with each sweaty grovel. The candour of their self-obsessed tirades becomes all the more shocking since they are father and daughter. As each is briefed pre-show one morning, the first reports reach their studios of the World Trade Center attacks and the chance is seized to ride this once in a lifetime tidal wave of breaking news. What ensues is a gore-fest of hyperboles, put-downs and one-liners as the pundits vie to show who's got the biggest spin and overnight ratings.	Hard on the heels of Wreck the Airline Barrier and The Zero Yard, the Riot Group are back with as relentless fare as ever. Adriano Shaplin's script unleashes far more than the Lear it purports to be by ruthlessly hacking away at an American sacred cow with all the irony of Larry Saunders and knowingness of Network.	Performed and directed by Paul Schnabel, Stephanie Viola, Drew Friedman and Shaplin, the grim, wicked humour and machine-gun delivery never strays far from the message. > return to top
Victory at the Dirt Palace. London Times. 8.19.2004. Robert Dawson-Scott.	Adriano Shaplin; remember that name. Three years ago Mr. Shaplin, then an undergraduate at a liberal arts college in upstate New York, formed a company called the Riot Group and brought his play Wreck the Airline Barrier to Edinburgh. It was a visceral assault on American capitalism, performed in an out-front, aggressive style that suited the material perfectly. As writer, director and one of the performers, Mr. Shaplin collected a brace of awards to take back to the college whose drama department had more or less turned its back on him because it though the was too weird. Now he is a post-graduate at Berkeley and his Riot Group is back with another firecracker of a play, this time about the American new media which, with faint echoes of King Lear, has a father and daughter competing for ratings as anchors on competing nightly news programmes.	Meanwhile, across Edinburgh, a group of recent graduates from Oxford have restaged his first play, adapting it slightly to this side of the Atlantic. The new production of Wreck the Airline Barrier is quite different from the original, played en traverso rather than front-on, less aggressively, though still at top speed, with well spoken English accents finding more nuances in the lines than Shaplin's original version. I liked Simon Wood's version less than the original but that may be just sentiment and it is still a decent piece of work. More importantly the play holds up very well on second viewing. Victory at the Dirt Palace reprises the machinegun delivery, inch-perfect timing and simple but highly polished production style of Shaplin's earlier production. The play benefits from concentrating on a more tightly focused subject and scores several bulls-eyes on the bizarre exploits behind the scenes of television news. Not all of them are original but the scenario of a massive national catastrophe breaking into the usual slick clichŽs and the ensuing meltdown and consequences are certainly dramatic.	Stephanie Viola, who plays K. Mann, the daughter, has a way of remaining entirely still and focused in the mayhem that is going on around her which is a joy to watch. It would be good to see Shaplin graduate to larger stages with more facilities. It is undoubtedly easier to create the claustrophobic intensity he is becoming known for in a sweaty loft than it is on a large stage. Perhaps someone like the Traverse, which has links with many North American companies, should be talking to him about his future plans. > return to top
Victory at the Dirt Palace. Glasgow Herald. 8.20.2002. Louisa McEwan.	Drawn from Shakespeare's King Lear, Victory at the Dirt Palace, is a spine-chilling black satire on the US television news industry. Working for separate networks, the bitter struggle between father and daughter in the ratings war becomes national headlines as sex secrets and underhand dealings compromise both.	Edinburgh Fringe First winners, the Riot Group, in an original and experimental piece of theatre, wreak havoc with the spectators' emotions in an intense acting style. Their articulate use of space, lighting, and music accentuates the dedicated and focused nature of this small group as they bark and bite at each other's words.	A magnificent piece of work, Victory at the Dirt Palace is an ingenious reworking of a favourite. > return to top
Victory at the Dirt Palace. Financial Times. 8.2003. Ian Shuttleworth.	American company the Riot Group return to the magnificent form they showed with Wreck the Airline Barrier in 1999. The Riot Group's last Edinburgh show, The Zero Yard, was a big disappointment: loud, long, grinding and frankly dull. This is a terrific return to form from the energetic young company. I say "energetic" because, even though they're on a desktop-sized stage in a cramped and airless studio, even though for most of the 75-minute piece they're all sitting down, they still give their all vocally, emotionally and intellectually.	The piece centers on a father and daughter who front rival network news programmes. When a September 11-style atrocity occurs (one minute, breaking news of the attack; next minute, war is declared; next minute, "We won the war", and it's all over!), the father decides to retire and pass his coveted place on to daughter K., but she's determined to make her own reputation.	Precisely 103 words from King Lear are woven into the script, and K is a conflation of both the loving Cordelia and the king's other two self-serving daughters, but the intense spirit flows through the whole piece. Fully deserving of the Fringe First it has been awarded. > return to top
Victory at the Dirt Palace. Evening Standard. 1.10.2003. Rachel Halliburton	Words are like weapons, and family ties like strangleholds in this hard-kicking newsroom drama, where the protagonists are so unrelentingly cynical you wonder if they catch bullets with their teeth for fun. Victory at the Dirt Palace savagely reworks King Lear as a bitter media battle between a father (James) and daughter (K) who are news anchors on different channels, and therefore royalty for this obsessive information age. Adriano Shaplin's ruthlessly energetic play takes its cue from the speed and macho attitudes inherent in the frenetic gravitas of a newsroom. His Lear figure - an amiably world-weary James Mann (played by Paul Schnabel) - is nauseated by the charade of shaping the news for the nation's excitement, declaring: "I am a neutral fool." Yet when he finds himself competing against Stephanie Viola's flintily defensive K he stops at nothing to save his fool's status, undermining her abilities in a partly sexualized attack that sees him sadistically telling her she looks "like a tart".	Sex - both as a latent and an active force - is a constant weapon in the Riot Group's rivetingly angry production, which is sparsely staged, with two black news desks facing the audience. A constant rhythmic drum-beat dominates the action, which shows K acting with the hatred of a Goneril or Regan as she competes publicly against James - in a wonderful twisted reworking of King Lear's opening scene she rages that her father loves her "like cancer loves cells" - yet fascinatingly also displaying a conflicted, Cordelia-like affection for him.	The satirical knife is twisted further for the central stand-off, when a September 11th-style attack hits New York, and James and K have to battle to come up with the most compelling report for America. Shaplin's clear point is that newsroom clichŽ and glib patriot-speak inevitably dominate when the unspeakable occurs: and so - in a deliberately crude reduction of historical events - war is declared within minutes of the attack, and won less than 10 minutes later. Occasionally, this daring play's merciless pace and constant anger can leave the audience member feeling bludgeoned. As war with Iraq looms, however, it seems a timely examination of the black arts of "objective" reporting. > return to top
Victory at the Dirt Palace. Guardian. 1.11.03. Lyn Gardner.	James Mann is king of the US prime-time news programme, a veteran broadcast journalist who always wins the ratings war. He was certain of the crown until his daughter Katherine was employed by a rival news channel. This is the night that father and daughter go head to head, and only one can be the victor. In the process, truth and integrity are the losers. California's the Riot Group had a hit with Adriano Shaplin's satire at the Edinburgh festival last year, and it remains a slick, sharp show - although only the absurdly naive will be surprised by what it tells us about the corruption of American values, the broadcast media's lack of accountability, its ruthless manipulation of language and heartstrings, and its obsession with sex scandals over hard news.	The impact of Shaplin's play comes not from what it says, but how it says it. Entwining a satire on the demands of 24-hour news and the need to fill yawning airtime with a modern interpretation of King Lear, Shaplin's dense, often smartly funny script rains down a storm of words and is given a full-frontal production that boasts terrific ensemble playing from the cast of four.	Where Victory really scores is not just in taking a general swipe at US news values, but putting them in the context of a post-September 11 world. While James and Katherine are battling it out there is a major terrorist attack on New York ("some tall buildings aren't as tall as they used to be"), war is swiftly declared and just as swiftly won, American dignity is dented and recovered and the platitudes pour forth. This is not a major play, more of an amusing and accurate aside, but it offers a sharper account of the post-9/11 mindset than most of the more personal responses that theatre has offered so far. > return to top
Victory at the Dirt Palace. Time Out London. 1.15.2003. Mark Espiner.	Blistering, breakneck and thoroughly committed, US company the Riot Group put Edinburgh in a spin last year. Fused with Shakespearean allusion and post-September 11 political angst, writer and performer Adriano Shaplin's play garnered plaudits aplenty. With sodium red lighting and an incessant, ambient-beat loop hyping the levels of expectation, adrenalin and anxiety, we are firmly thrust into the deadline-driven world of broadcast news. News anchor James Mann and his daughter K are going head-to-head in a ratings war on rival TV networks. They spit at each other over speakerphones, their assistants jostle for power, and all have knives at the ready for the appropriate back. And then news breaks of a September 11-style attack, a story that defines and alters their lives and relationships.	TV news and the sex, power and politics that drive are fertile ground. Twenty-three year-old Shaplin has chosen besides to pepper his plot with hashed up King Lear references and dress his text with slang glossed with Elizabethan tones. When it isn't baffling, the language is gripping, with the grand style butting up against glib and inappropriate TV-speak at the 'over-whelming, troubling times' of the attack. Icily precise acting, particularly in the case of Stephanie Viola's K, adds to the aesthetic of the piece too. But the overly fleet delivery - clearly a directorial choice - confuses and occasionally trips up the fine ensemble acting. Moreover, the focus on the father-daughter relationship - characters we are not led to care much for - seems misplaced. More satire on media response to war and death would have been welcome.	In short, the style is surgically sharp, but the content doesn't quite cut it. That said, you can't fault the unrelenting determination of this company to make you sit up and listen. > return to top
Victory at the Dirt Palace. London Times. 1.16.2004. Ian Johns.	The US ensemble the Riot Group lives up to its name with this fast and furious satire of American television news values. Spinning off King Lear, Victory at the Dirt Palace pits James Mann, the ageing king of primetime news, against his alienated daughter Katherine, a news anchor on a rival TV network who hopes to seize his crown in the ratings. On either side their respective scheming assistants play on their egos and insecurities. James has grown weary of a sensation-seeking media and wants to hand over his domain to Katherine. Amid her antipathy she shows flickers of affection. But ambition wins the day and the gloves are off in a battle that brands him as little more than "the nation's occasionally disturbing bedtime story" and her as a "foxy tart with daddy issues".	It becomes a fight to the ratings death when news breaks of a September 11-style attack on New York. In a nicely glib touch, war in our sound-bite age is waged and won in about the time it takes for an ad break. The test for James and Katherine is to come up with a response - all platitudes and patriotic blather - that the American public wants to hear. The writer and director Adriano Shaplin adopts a rapid-fire, kinetic style of dialogue that makes each exchange the verbal equivalent of trading punches. He effectively skewers the self-importance and macho posturing of US news presentation and the homespun philosophy that becomes even more vacuous faced with an unspeakable event. But it doesn't make for fresh or incisive satire. Will Eno's play Tragedy: A Tragedy covered the same ground with a similarly absurdist approach a couple of years ago. And the script's relentless mixture of aggressive banter and stylized demotic - imagine David Mamet and Steven Berkoff in a head-on collision - leaves you a little numb by the end.	What Shaplin's production does offer, however, is some of the sharpest ensemble acting you're likely to see this year. The cast of four doesn't miss a beat, even when flashes of Shakespeare are effectively deployed to increasingly warped effect; Lear's famous meteorological outburst ends up in a weather report. As James, Paul Schnabel is a suitably world-weary figure and captures perfectly the face of hangdog sincerity adopted for "serious" news. Stephanie Viola is an impressive bundle of Reagan, Goneril and Cordelia, while Shaplin and Drew Friedman make entertainingly bitchy pseudo-sisters. After London, the production tours to Dublin, Cambridge, Southampton and Manchester. The performances make this worth looking out for. > return to top
Victory at the Dirt Palace. Financial Times. 1.19.2004. Ian Shuttleworth.	"Professional wrestling, musical theater, slam poetry, television news, religious sermons, and self-help manuals serve as the blueprint for a style that is simultaneously familiar and disorienting, satirical yet deadly serious." With at least 95% of theatre companies, such a statement would signal earnest, self-satisfied, unfocused and overblown tripe. In the case of the Riot Group (from whose Web site it comes), it is no more than succinct and descriptive. After a clutch of awards on recent Edinburgh Fringes, this exhilaratingly intense young American company now makes its first visit to London with its 2002 show Victory at the Dirt Palace.	James Mann (Paul Schnabel) is the king of television network news (the title is not used lightly: read on), now facing competition from his daughter K (Stephanie Viola) on a station which is at once in deep rivalry with his and merely the other side of the same coin. The Manns and their respective producer/assistants conduct high-speed verbal and ratings battles whilst reporting as-it-happens on a September 11-style atrocity and war (news of the attack, declaration of war and announcement of victory all come within about four minutes of each other) and attempting to settle the succession on James Mann's sudden retirement. For this is also a rewrite, of sorts, of King Lear, albeit one in which K incorporates elements of both the independent yet loving Cordelia and her treacherous sisters. Writer/director Adriano Shaplin's text contains, it is claimed, exactly 103 words of Shakespeare's text, interspersed amid other material ranging from cod-heroic bombast to semi-surreal bitchery such as "I'm the son he never had" Ð "No, you're the kitten he never drowned".	Even in the smallest of the three Riverside Studios, the stage alone is around twice the size of the entire cramped venue in which the show played in Edinburgh. Yet even with room to breathe, it retains its claustrophobic intensity. All four performers are almost continuously seated, but still convey a terrific energy, giving their all vocally, emotionally and intellectually. Shaplin's black view of American, and thus global, culture impresses through the originality of its style more than of its content. Sometimes, too, that style can take time to tune in to, as with his use (continuing on from earlier work) of the term "Salvon" as a kind of brand-name shorthand for the whole nexus of social, political, religious and corporate values that make up America's sense of itself; even the two television networks here have the acronyms SAL and VON. But the inventiveness, commitment and postmodern panache of the Riot Group make them a company to savour. > return to top
Victory at the Dirt Palace. Independent. 1.21.2004. Paul Taylor.	As a renowned television "anchor", Dan Rather of CBS is, by definition, not a man you would expect to rock the boat. But he has been so disgusted by the hobbling of the media and by the distortion of news values in the wake of September 11 that last May he felt the need to speak out. The atmosphere, he said, is one of "patriotism run amok", where television journalists have lapsed into a kind of "self-censorship", as if an inner voice were cautioning them to think "I know the right question, but you know what? This is not exactly the right time to ask it." But holding leaders to account is precisely a journalist's patriotic duty.	One wonders, therefore, what Mr. Rather would make of Victory at the Dirt Palace, an exhilaratingly vicious - if somewhat generalized - satiric swipe at American television news by his young compatriot, Adriano Shaplin. Performed by the Riot Group in a production of mesmeric motor-mouth intensity and deadpan dippiness, the show was first seen at last year's Edinburgh Festival, which bristled with un-reviewable shows about the psychological wounds left by September 11. "We are in pain and in shock" was the message. "Well, we're very sorry, but are you also in a work of art?" was the reasonable response. This play, by contrast, puts the attack on the twin towers into a bracingly unsentimental context.	When asked whether her jewels were real, Cole Porter's wife asked, in turn, "Real what?" Victory at the Dirt Palace is not really the update of King Lear as claimed. But it is a real blackly comic achievement. Lear begins by making the fatal mistake of abdicating. James Mann, the king of US prime-time news, by contrast, is energized into a new lease of frantic life when his daughter (who is Regan, Goneril and Cordelia rolled into one) is promoted to the anchor position on a rival channel, sparking off a deadly ratings war. On the night of their first battle, news comes through of a major terrorist attack in New York. In their own commercial breaks, they watch how the other is faring in improvising the "right" response for America. Even with a breaking story on this scale, their own private war is the news that really matters to them. The play doesn't develop this idea as tenaciously as it might, but there's a visceral verve in Shaplin's writing and a poise in the face of colossal cynicism that makes me keen to see his next work. I also liked the way the production eschewed high-tech, leaving the swarm of televisual images to our imagination and throwing a hard spotlight on the sweating live protagonists. > return to top
Victory at the Dirt Palace. Independent on Sunday. 2.3.2004. Kate Bassett.	...Far more exhilarating and bold is the Riot Group's radical reworking of King Lear, which I caught on tour at the Riverside Studios and which deservedly won a Fringe First at Edinburgh last year.	Victory at the Dirt Palace, written by Adriano Shaplin, transmutes Shakespeare's old English monarch into a power-crazed but ageing US newsreader called James Mann. His TV empire is embroiled in a desperate ratings battle with a rival channel where his bitter Ð possibly abused Ð daughter rules the roost but faces a scathing exposŽ of kinky romps with her producer.	Though the dialogue is too relentlessly rapid-fire and the characters' ravings can be obtuse, this is a ferocious and slick farce. Everyone stares icily out front as if eternally ready for the cameras to roll. Chilly professional posturing is intercut with wildly vicious personal phone calls, and modern slanging matches are unsettlingly shot through with archaic curses and a subtle lyricism. A young troupe to watch. > return to top
Victory at the Dirt Palace. Culture Wars. 2.2003. Munira Mirza.	Having won a Fringe First at the Edinburgh Festival in 1999, the Riot Group returned from the US to do the same again in 2002 with this caustic, accomplished and highly intelligent play, which now comes to London. Victory centers on the emotional warfare waged between rival father and daughter news anchors in the US. Their enmity is fuelled by their equal measures of pride, as they compete in the ratings war to be America's most loved news figure. The true test of their mettle arrives when a rather vague but decisive 'terrorist attack' is perpetrated against the people of New York, forcing out the question of who the American people tune in to watch during their hour of need.	The taut, often hilarious script of Victory contains numerous ideas to explore. As a reworking of King Lear, the play is a powerful study of possession and pride between father and daughter. The dramatic tension is heightened by the tiny, darkened set and fact that the four characters barely take a breath between lines, spouting venom and insult at each other. As a satirical swipe at the news media in the US, Victory takes no prisoners. The irrelevance of the real world in comparison to the ratings becomes so explicit that at one point, clueless about what is happening in the city, the characters ad lib the news in order to sustain the audience's attention. What is at one moment a 'brave act' by anti-capitalist demonstrators quickly becomes transformed into a wanton act of destruction on the American way of life by 'religious fundamentalists'. The unwavering certainty of the newsreaders' tone gives them enough authority to decide what is and what is not really going on. Throughout all that is going on, it is the interruption of 'object permanence tests', for a disorder from which both the father and daughter suffer, that reveals the crisis at the heart of the play - the main characters cannot grasp that something can exist even when they cannot see it. Their sense of reality has little to do with the objective world and is increasingly informed only by their own consciousness, distorting the truth and ultimately corroding their relationship with each other.	In fact, the choice of King Lear is particularly apt. A man's own pride and self-obsession blinds him to the real world, in which he subjects his most beloved daughter Cordelia, to suffering. When the individual cannot relate to others, his need for love and recognition becomes unrelenting in its quest for satisfaction and acquires a self-destructive, perverted dynamic. In Victory this is made evident through the daughter's degenerate sexual taste and inability to share intimacy with her lover. For the father, his descent into madness reveals how his consciousness is disintegrating and he demands his daughter's admission of love to save himself. The reference to therapeutic jargon throughout the play reminds us that this is America, after all, where the modern cult of narcissism dominates. It is rare to see a play which steals so well from Shakespeare to explain the present day and even better that the playwright should strive to achieve the same degree of complexity for his characters and language. These are strong, challenging roles for the actors as they are required to control and pace their lines as if reciting a long lyrical poem. The mixture of a remarkable script, and forceful acting creates an electric, thought-provoking experience. > return to top
Victory at the Dirt Palace. Irish Times. 2.15.2003. Fintan O'Toole.	Good timing is a theatrical virtue, and the arrival from California of Adriano Shaplin's Victory at the Dirt Palace could hardly be better calculated. As the psychic pain of the events of September 11, 2001 is about to express itself in war, this loopy, unhinged show is just about deranged enough to qualify as a work of up-to-the-minute realism. The Dirt Palace is staged by the Riot Group, a small but explosive theatre collective founded in 1997. Its style combines the absurdist comedy of Ionesco, with raw, confrontational political content and a hyped-up, fast-paced performance style. The in-your-face ethos is exemplified by the title of its first production in 1998, Why I Want to Shoot the President. This new piece, which premiered at last year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival, exemplifies the strengths of a tightly-knit collective in which the traditional boundaries between performer, director, designer and playwright are largely ignored. With Victory at the Dirt Palace, Adriano Shaplin is both the author and one of the four performers and direction is by the group as a whole. This fusion of skills gives coherence and drive to a work that might otherwise be incoherent and aimless.	The plot, such as it is, is a compound of Network, King Lear and a tab of acid. America's two most popular new anchors, James Mann and his daughter K, fight to the death for dominance in the ratings. His dementia and her predilection for sado-masochistic sex are woven into a serious of disconnected quotations from King Lear and a bravely absurdist take on the atrocity at the Twin Towers and the war in Afghanistan. If the Riot Group were not inconveniently Californian, the piece could to denounced as anti-American. Yet its satire is in fact very American. The combination of political commentary and psychodrama in a genuine reflection of the television presents world events, with shocking realities filtered through the personalities of the star presenters. The daring nature of the piece lies in its tone, which refuses to be merely zany but combines madcap hysteria with high seriousness. Its wild humour is contained within a stark, beautifully simple form. There are no elaborate sets, just two desks, two chairs and a table. At one desk, sits the ageing James Mann (the wonderful Paul Schnabel), with his scheming sidekick Andrew (Drew Friedman). At the other is his icy daughter (Stephanie Viola), with her kinky lover, executive producer and nemesis Spence, played by the author.	This potentially static set-up is kept in motion by the sheer intensity of the ensemble playing and the ferocious pace of the action, which is packed into a breathless 70 minutes. The methodical madness builds towards a perfectly pitched crescendo of lunacy, followed by a wickedly hilarious epilogue. Strange as it may seem the frenetic, wired style does achieve a kind of mock-Shakespearean grandeur that makes the use of King Lear not entirely bathetic. It would be nice to think that a piece as strange as this could be regarded as a far-out exercise in avant-garde experimentalism. The unfortunate truth, and the reason the play has such an immediate edge, is that it is only slightly less weird than the reality that is shaping the world. > return to top