King Lear for the TV age

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 sexualised 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 aSeptember 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 clichÈ 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.

Until 1 February. Box office: 020 8237 1111.