Victory at the Dirt Palace

Victory at the Dirt Palace
Riverside Studios

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 centres 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 naricissism 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.

Till 1 February

See the Culture Wars review of Victory at the Dirt Palace at the Edinburgh Festival here.