Reading the riot act

Adriano Shaplin compares his theatre company, The Riot Group, with a long-forgotten punk band. 'We're a bit like The Misfits, that bunch of kids in the 1970s who had never heard a punk record, but based their music on what they thought punk might sound like,' he says. 'Hence they wrote all these three-chord songs about aliens...'

The analogy doesn't quite stand up: The Misfits were so bad that, at the time, people wondered whether they were actually a joke. By comparison, the San Francisco-based The Riot Group are deadly serious. Shaplin admits he started out wanting to make theatre in the vein of Artaud and Brecht without knowing much about either, but since those early days that ignorance has become his strength.

His group's latest play, Pugilist Specialist - a dizzyingly articulate piece with no stage design, set aboard a US mission to the Middle East - is the best post 9/11 play to emerge from America. It won The Scotsman's coveted best of the Fringe Firsts in Edinburgh last year. Hot on the heels of previous Edinburgh successes Victory At The Dirt Palace (a reworking of King Lear set in a CNN newsroom) and 1999's Wreck The Airline Barrier, it suggests The Riot Group are fast becoming one of contemporary theatre's most original talents.

Shaplin set up The Riot Group while at university studying drama in New York, but found both the course and the company disappointing. 'I went to college to learn about the theatre of cruelty and found myself doing revivals of David Hare,' he says.

He swapped courses to anthropology and decided that, as far as theatre was concerned, he would only work with non-trained actors. From that point The Riot Group became a protest. It threw out psychological realism and introduced a highly stylised discourse using contemporary America as the platform for provocative moral argument. 'No one knew what to make of us,' says Shaplin.

And, five years on, people still don't - at least in their native America, where they remain at best a local curiosity. 'There's no sense of a collective theatre consciousness in America,' says Shaplin. 'Cinema is our national language.' In fact, the group have to date funded their own work, supplementing their income with teaching and, for Shaplin, unlikely stints as a bouncer.

In Britain, by contrast, where hunger for theatre that does battle with the same stories that fill our newspapers is high, The Riot Group are a thrilling blast of fresh air. Yet even here Shaplin confounds expectation. 'It would have been the easiest thing in the world to make Pugilist a left-wing, anti-war play,' he says. 'So I didn't. After all, we are all culpable. We all pay money for the military and vote for governments that have armies. Soldiers are only doing their job. So I wrote it from their perspective. It complicates things.'

One senses that for Shaplin, the old lines of policy and protest are no longer applicable. 'Protest isn't about picking up a flag and going on a march any more,' he says. 'What good does that do? The techniques of warfare have changed dramatically but our response to power constructs is stuck in the 1960s.'

Shaplin's own answer is to acknowledge the difficulties and subtleties of 21st-century politics with theatre that packs a punch to the gut and the head. 'I'm not trying to write a polemic against war or lies,' he says. 'I'm just trying to set up a debate.'

Pugilist Specialist, tomorrow until Feb 7, Soho Theatre, 21 Dean Street W1, Mon to Sat 7.30pm, Sat mats 4pm, £15, £12.50 concs, mats £5. Tel: 020 7478 0100. Tube: Tottenham Court Road