Victory At The Dirt Palace, Riverside Studios<br></br>Road, Lyric Hammersmith, London

Have they got news for you?

As a renowned television "anchor", Dan Rather of CBS is, by definition, not a man you would expect to rock the boat. But he has been so disgusted by the hobbling of the media and by the distortion of news values in the wake of September 11 that last May he felt the need to speak out. The atmosphere, he said, is one of "patriotism run amok", where television journalists have lapsed into a kind of "self-censorship", as if an inner voice were cautioning them to think "I know the right question, but you know what? This is not exactly the right time to ask it." But holding leaders to account is precisely a journalist's patriotic duty.

One wonders, therefore, what Mr Rather would make of Victory at the Dirt Palace, an exhilaratingly vicious – if somewhat generalised – satiric swipe at American television news by his young compatriot, Adriano Shaplin. Performed by the Riot Group in a production of mesmeric motormouth intensity and deadpan dippiness, the show was first seen at last year's Edinburgh Festival, which bristled with unreviewable shows about the psychological wounds left by September 11. "We are in pain and in shock" was the message. "Well, we're very sorry, but are you also in a work of art?" was the reasonable response. This play, by contrast, puts the attack on the twin towers into a bracingly unsentimental context.

When asked whether her jewels were real, Cole Porter's wife asked, in turn, "Real what?". Victory at the Dirt Palace is not really the update of King Lear as claimed. But it is a real blackly comic achievement. Lear begins by making the fatal mistake of abdicating. James Mann, the king of US prime-time news, by contrast, is energised into a new lease of frantic life when his daughter (who is Regan, Goneril and Cordelia rolled into one) is promoted to the anchor position on a rival channel, sparking off a deadly ratings war. On the night of their first battle, news comes through of a major terrorist attack in New York. In their own commercial breaks, they watch how the other is faring in improvising the "right" response for America. Even with a breaking story on this scale, their own private war is the news that really matters to them.

The play doesn't develop this idea as tenaciously as it might, but there's a visceral verve in Shaplin's writing and a poise in the face of colossal cynicism that makes me keen to see his next work. I also liked the way the production eschewed high-tech, leaving the swarm of televisual images to our imagination and throwing a hard spotlight on the sweating live protagonists.

Just a few streets away from the Riverside, at the Lyric, Hammersmith, high-tech has been none-too-effectively applied to Pilot Theatre's robust revival of Jim Cartwright's Road. But the author-sanctioned and assisted attempts to update and digitally enhance this celebrated Under Milk Wood of the other side of Thatcher's Britain (there are now references to Posh and Becks and a wash of DVD images) only serve to bring home how deeply Eighties a piece this is.

If you're going to deal with contemporary urban blight, you've got to bring in drugs – which (unless I missed something) are mysteriously absent from these proceedings. The teenagers in the audience seemed to like best the broad, hilarious, yet desperately sad sexual knockabout and to resist the self-consciously poetic monologues about the hopelessness of life on the scrap heap.

At this particular stage of the game, Road is not looking like the classic we thought it would be.

'Victory at the Dirt Palace' to 1 Feb (020-8237 1111); 'Road' to 1 Feb (020-8741 2311)