Preview: Pugilist Specialist
Soho Theatre, London

Dolan Cummings

When I was browsing through the Edinburgh Fringe programme back in July, looking for shows to review at a series of round table discussions, Pugilist Specialist leapt out as an obvious choice for the evening on the theme of 'war and terror'.

In fact, having seen 2002's Victory at the Dirt Palace, I already knew that the Riot Group would be worth a look. In Victory, writer Adriano Shaplin adapted King Lear to satirise the media's response to 9/11, in the process asking deeper questions about how we understand reality. In Pugilist he turns his attention to the military, with the four social archetypes who make up a US assassination squad charged with taking out a foreign leader exchanging confused perceptions of what it's all about.

With one 'Big Stache' newly in custody and another 'Bearded Lady' still at large, Pugilist Specialist is as timely now as it was last summer, and the war on terror shows no signs of letting up this side of Armageddon. Significantly, though, the show tells us more about our own society (in an important sense, we are all Americans) than it does about the elusive 'other'. The play portrays the war on terror as a quasi-erotic enterprise, more existential than political, and casting severe doubt on the way America understands itself. Indeed, Pugilist Specialist turned out to be just as enlightening as subject matter for another Fringe discussion on 'visions of America'.

While many in the anti-war camp are guilty of lazy, 'I'm not anti-American, but…' posturing, those who support the war don't do any better in explaining what it is about America, or indeed the West in general, that is worth fighting for, beyond empty platitudes about freedom that are contradicted anyway by the conduct of the war. Pugilist Specialist captures something of the ambiguity of the contemporary Western identity.

As soldiers of course, the protagonists aren't meant to think about who they are, what their mission really means and whether it is right or wrong. They are just supposed to obey orders. As Gene Hackman's belligerent submarine captain puts it in Crimson Tide, 'We're here to defend democracy, not practise it'. But where human beings are concerned, there can be no neat separation of existential doubt from military necessity. Shaplin's soldiers are all over the place, suspicious, resentful, just plain wrong in the head.

Shaplin writes expressly for the group, and all four collaborate in the direction, so like their previous work, Pugilist Specialist is very much an ensemble piece, with each member of the group inhabiting his or her character with frightening plausibility, from Shaplin's own obnoxious slob of a sniper, to Stephanie Viola's uptight feminist stormtrooper. Pugilist is less physically intense than Victory at the Dirt Palace, but in any case, their growing success means the Riot Group no longer play in those intimate venues where the audience can expect to get hit in the eye by flying sweat.

There is no escaping the language, though. Pugilist Specialist is a bewildering onslaught of wordplay and wisecracks. One one level, the dialogue satirises bureaucratic military-speak and American neurosis in general, but ultimately it rises above the plot (which, by the way, I don't get), and indeed the ostensible theme of the play, to entrance the audience in a kind of intellectual stupor. It's like the war on terror itself, but cleverer.

14 January till 7 February

Dolan Cummings and Red Room director Lisa Goldman will be taking part in a discussion with the Riot Group after the matinee performance on Saturday 24 January.

See Culture Wars' reviews of Pugilist Specialist at the 2003 Edinburgh Fringe.