Interview: Adriano Shaplin
Playwright and performer, The Riot Group

James Panton

At the 2002 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, The Riot Group got a string of rave reviews and collected their second Fringe First for the play Victory at the Dirt Palace (their first First was for Wreck the Airline Barrier in 1999). They've recently finished a two-month tour of England and Ireland and they're set to tour Scotland over the summer before returning to the Festival with a new work, The Pugilist Specialist.

According to one of their reviews at last year's Edinburgh Festival, The Riot Group are 'Mindblowingly, headfuckingly awesome!' Not the most erudite of reviews, perhaps, but it does capture something of the group's highly physical, challenging and violent style of theatre. The dialogue is performed at break-neck speed - so much so that the group have had to slow things down during their British tour to make sure the audience can keep up. The players perform face on to the audience and spit their lines. The lines themselves are modelled, Shaplin has said, on 'official speech - a peculiar and perverse kind of poetry' - but it is a poetry which is underscored by violence - the seedy, the dirty and the perversity of life which for the most part we keep hidden from view.

The Riot Group was formed as a reaction against the Sarah Lawrence Drama School in New York, where Shaplin was an undergraduate in 1997. Sick of his own plays not being performed, Shaplin got together with a group of friends, some trained in drama, some not, and started rehearsing and performing his work. Apart from one actor brought in specially for Victory, the group's line up is the same as it was back in 1997. The close interpersonal dynamic of the group is key to their work: 'I'm not interested in writing for anyone else, and I'm lucky enough to be working with a group of friends who've said that they're not interested in working anywhere else. It's not like I'm a writer and The Riot Group produce my work. The writing and the production are not two different entities. I write with this group of performers in mind, and then the pieces are produced and directed collectively.'

This helps to explain the intensity the group are able to bring to their performances, and it is cohered by an underlying philosophy: 'I think we share a common goal of trying to do something new with theatre.' At drama school Shaplin was annoyed by the whole idea of 'learning' drama and the theatre.

'I just felt that there was something different and more exciting to be done with theatre than learning how to sing or learning all these actor techniques - like how to have a stage-fight and how to breath from your diaphragm and how to pull someone's hair without really hurting them. It seemed as if we were learning how to be stage magicians and illusionists - learning how to take something real and then make it unreal. The Riot Group was born out of a disdain for all that illusion and trickery.'

The violence of their work is one means of getting beyond that illusion. On one level, Shaplin claims that the violence is simply making explicit what is contained implicitly in all performance. Performers, he claims, are using their bodies to create something that isn't really there, and in that basic fact there is already 'a ghost like quality, a certain kind of death in every performance.' But there is something more than just this in the violence The Riot Group put themselves and their audiences through every night. It is also envisaged as a comment on a contemporary world that seem increasingly dislocated from anything real.

'It's a kind of challenge to all this plasticated fakery,' says Shaplin. 'Violence is a way of showing real physical interaction. We're trying to alert people to the fact that they're in a room with real bodies - they're not in a cinema, they're not at a pop concert. So much of our contemporary life is electrical and digitalised and fake, and the violence in our work is just one way to alert people to the fact that they're in the presence of real bodies.'

It's a manifesto Shaplin takes seriously. Indeed, he admits that he's passed out a couple of times during the erotic-asphyxiation scene in Victory. I wonder aloud then if he isn't in the wrong business - aren't the illusions he disdains what acting and theatre are all about? 'There's certainly a place for illusion,' he concedes, 'but if that's what you want then go see Les Miserables. We're about something different than that.'

The obsession with a dislocation of life from reality underpins much of Shaplin's work with the group. In their award-winning 1999 work, Wreck the Airline Barrier, three representatives of white corporate America are put together on a plane trip to Spain. They use their mobiles to phone their children, they chat about fear of flying in the departure lounge, and then they board the plane which will very soon come crashing back down to earth.

As it begins to career out of control, the passengers begin a descent into psychological anarchy. Shaplin asks us what would happen if the distinction between our inner thoughts and our public persona were elided. In Wreck the Airline Barrier, his answer is a descent into racial and sexual perversity which he sees at the heart of middle-class white America. As a political comment on what Shaplin calls the 'hidden' class - the piece is a little crude and unsatisfying. Yet as a piece of theatre, 'headfuckingly awesome' seems appropriate.

Shaplin's 2002 Victory at the Dirt Palace asks a similar question about the line between the our inner and outer worlds, and between the real and the represented, and it does so with more nuanced and intellectually satisfying results. The piece centres on the relationship between a father and daughter who are news anchors for rival TV networks. Shaplin gives a nod towards the Bard - or to be specific, he gives us exactly 103 of his words from King Lear - and he polarises the moments of Lear's decent towards madness into the conflict between father and daughter.

Both suffer from 'object permanence disorder' - an inability to differentiate their own experience of the object world from the experiences of other people - presented with new information the characters are unable to remember how they saw things before, or to conceptualise how other people would view things in the absence of such information.

On one level, Shaplin is presenting a comment on the corporate media for which every event is a new event and every disaster is but an opportunity to win the ratings war. At the centre of the play is a 9/11 style terrorist attack on New York - an event which Shaplin sees as an 'exceptionally well choreographed piece of theatre', an event whose very reality was lived through, perhaps even organised for, the world media.

But underlying this comment on the media is a more profound insight into a world in which reality seems to have become increasingly performative, in which lived experience and representation are elided, and in which the distinction between the private psyche and the public persona seems increasingly unsustainable.

One of the effects of this very real elision is between the inner and the outer world is what Shaplin sees as a loss of space for intellectual freedom and expression. 'There aren't a lot of places where people can come together in rooms anymore. Wherever there are a group of people protesting something or celebrating something, you can guarantee that there will also be a law there to give the police the right to come and break things up. I'm interested in the theatre as a place where we're still allowed to have a big group of people come together in one room to see each other and talk to each other and communicate.' In this sense, Shaplin sees his theatre as a truly counter-cultural space: 'A tiny zone of autonomy. It's a tiny little place where you can feel free.'

The attempt to construct such a counter-cultural zone of autonomy runs throughout The Riot Group's oeuvre. 'There are points of continuity between each performance and even between each of the different plays - the same group of actors who use the same slang from show to show. There's even an individual character who never appears but who we refer to in each piece - although not a lot of people notice that.' This is one reason why Shaplin is at pains to explain that his writing cannot be distinguished from The Riot Group as a whole: 'If its true that what we're trying to do is to create something truly new,' he explains, 'the paradox is that this means one of our jobs is to keep repeating ourselves, to remain unoriginal, if you see what I mean.'

This paradox takes us closer towards Shaplin's idea of what his theatre is all about. At the same time as establishing a continuity from play to play and from night to night, there's an attempt to make every show a discrete and original experience: 'We go out of our way to do the lines differently and trip each other up every night just to wake each other up and remind ourselves that we are on stage at that moment and it's not the night before or a week ago, it's that night. It's something real.'

In this way the audience gets an original experience which is at the same time something familiar - from the continuity of the players and the jokes to the attempt to unsettle the audience with a certain lighting- and music-induced mood. In a world in which the line between the real and the fictional is elided, Shaplin seems to want to use the theatre as a means towards reality itself - and not just theatre as performance, but the whole lived-experience of the theatrical space.

Of course, there's nothing new in the idea of approaching reality through art, but isn't there something a little perverse in attempting to establish not just a representation of the world, but a zone of lived reality, through works of theatre? Shaplin points out that the reality of his work is achieved through its attempt to engage and challenge the audience. In all of his plays, the actors stand face on to the audience and speak to them almost to the exclusion of speaking to each other: 'We face the audience, because that's who we're talking to, and in that way we're trying to enter into a kind of dialogue with the audience. The whole thing is an attempt to create a space where people feel the power to speak to each other.'

It's an intriguing idea, and one that makes for an original and challenging theatrical experience. But I'm worried that what Shaplin is envisaging sounds a bit less like a zone of reality than a zone of theraputic 'empowerment' - a zone where people feel empowered to speak. Shaplin doesn't think so.

'In the US,' he says, 'everyone is always going on about their childhood - and no-one ever disagrees. But that's not a dialogue. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a properly critical kind of dialogue. Everything in contemporary culture seems to be about teaching us to be passive, to be good listeners. I'm interested in creating something that can be the opposite of that. I hate the way audiences are taught how to behave - they're taught when to clap and how to react - I'm more interested in seeing an audience that moves freely. I don't know what that is, but I'd like to see it.'

Ultimately, this is one of the most engaging features of The Riot Group's work. You get the impression that they're really onto something, but at the end of the play you're left in a position of uncertainty about exactly what it is. Shaplin himself doesn't seem too sure. On the one hand, he wants his theatre to work as a truly radical challenge to the status quo in which public dialogue seems obsolete and critical engagement entirely lacking - 'The idea of critical dialogue is a truly radical thing,' he claims, 'because we're living in a culture that is continually trying to suppress dialogue and induce passivity.'

But just as I'm wondering if it isn't too much to expect of a few plays to change this culture, however deadening and disintegrative it may be, Shaplin asserts that 'to be honest, I think I'm much too young and much too dumb to have any really firm political agenda.'

This moment of modesty might also explain what it is about The Riot Group's work that makes it both intellectually challenging and theatrically original. There isn't an underlying critique to be uncovered. The media presented in Victory - obsessed by ratings and driven by the dollar - may not be a particularly original critique, something which a number of British reviewers have pointed out, but to say this misses the point. Shaplin takes a number of insights about the world and tries to make sense of them. The theatre which results may not be the basis for a change in the world of politics, but it does present a very striking challenge to theatrical convention, and it does so in a way that leaves you gasping for breath, and stimulated and confused in equal measure.

You might not be convinced, but you will be challenged, which is just about the highest compliment I can think of for a piece of theatre. And when you remember that Shaplin is only 23, and the rest of the group not much older, they might well have time to convince us yet.

The Riot Group's Scottish Tour with Victory at the Dirt Palace starts in Glasgow in July. They return to the Edinburgh Fringe in August with a new play, The Pugilist Specialist. Go to www.theriotgroup.com or email info@theriotgroup.com for dates and details.

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