Edinburgh 2002

Fringe

Victory at the Dirt Palace
The Garage

James Panton

It's rare that one sits in the theatre and experiences something truly brilliant, but such is the case with the Riot Group's latest offering. As is often the case, however, it is not altogether easy to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes this such an exciting piece of work.

Superficially, Victory at the Dirt Palace is a comment on the media told through the relationship between father and daughter news anchors working for rival US networks. It also plays with the same relationship, and the descent into madness, of King Lear. But it is much more than this.

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 these characters are unable to remember how they saw things before, or to conceptualise how other people would view things in the absence of such new information. Thus, on the superficial level, object permanence disorder comments upon the vacuous nature of the news media for whom every event is a new event, every disaster is the worst disaster that has ever happened; in the struggle for novelty and ratings, a sense of history and perspective is missing.

Yet on a more profound level, the notion of object permanence disorder seems to hint at the elision of the inner and outer world, the confusion of private psyche and public consciousness, that pervades contemporary society. This is a theme that Adriano Shaplin, the Riot Group's writer, director and actor, has played with before. In the 1999 Fringe First winning Wreck the Airline Barrier, Shaplin put representatives of white corporate America together on an aeroplane and envisaged what would happen if they failed to distinguish their private thoughts and prejudices from their public statements.

The result was an anarchic outpouring of racist and sexist perversity. Victory uses a similar device to an altogether more intellectually sophisticated end: in the modern world, it asks, where is the line between the news told in the media and the reality of the world it comments upon. The question becomes all the more urgent when the attacks of 9/11 are introduced as nothing more than the backdrop to a 24 hour ratings war.

The idea of the war against terrorism as a construct for national media and domestic policy is raised here in a disturbingly astute way. But this is not a work of politics masquerading as theatre. At the heart of Victory is an attempt to unsettle the audience's sense of security and meaning. The dialogue is performed at a lightening pace that is as exhausting for the audience as it must be for the players.

The latter are clearly so familiar with the piece and with each other that at no point do they appear to be acting: they deliver their lines as if from instinct, and the result is that one is barely given enough time to breathe, let alone to reflect upon what is going on before you.

Combine all this with the claustrophobic atmosphere - I rather had the impression I was watching a piece of theatre performed in the confines of a submarine at war - and the sheer intensity of the performance - as one member of the audience put it, the piece begins at gas mark 10 and remarkably manages to reach gas mark 12 after 75 minutes - and you are left with a piece of theatre that you know you need to watch again and again, and that you will have a different though equally disturbing experience each time.

This is a piece of work that will stay with you for a long time.

Until August 26: 19.30 (1hr 15 minutes).