Komedia, Gardner Street, Until Saturday May 15

A Dr Strangelove for the 21st Century, this latest play from the pen of 24-year-old Adrian Shaplin cleaned up all the major awards at last year's Edinburgh festival.

Yet, in their native US, The Riot Group remain largely unseen.

After six years together and seven productions, the company continue to hold down day-jobs and still occasionally pay to stage their works.

This should tell you much about the timely subject matter and eloquence of their productions.

Previous subjects have ranged from warring news anchors who invent atrocities to a plane crash where the doomed passengers voiced their hatred and self-loathing. Now they've undertaken a searching examination of US military expansionism.

In Pugilist Specialist, four highly-trained US Marines - a once liberal colonel, a sensitive spin doctor, a gung-ho sniper and a feminist explosives expert - are enlisted to eliminate a Middle Eastern leader.

Initially known as The Bearded Lady, now referred to as Big 'Stache, their target has, over the course of the play's touring, shifted in the audience's imagination from Osama Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein.

In fact, the idea for the play came to Shaplin while watching an interview with a claimed former mistress of Saddam Hussein. "The whole interview", he says, "was about finding ways for her to say Saddam was impotent.

"If adversaries were being feminised while America was trumpeted as the macho hero, I wondered if I could write an account of the conflict as a twisted love story."

Describing their target audience as "anyone who has an opinion about the Iraqi war", the primary target for The Riot Group's dark cynicism is political spin or, as Shaplin puts it, "the way in which personal reactions are harnessed by government and media to make a political point to a malleable audience".

Just as real-life PR waffle often supercedes the importance of finding real-life solutions, the only stage action in Pugilist Specialist is the readjustment of two benches. This play is all of words.

Engaging in dense verbal sparring and delivering ingenious one-liners that range from the acerbic wit of Edmund Blackadder to the absurdist humour of Catch 22, the characters, nevertheless, face and address the audience.

An all-hearing microphone dangles from the ceiling and a soundtrack amplifies the noise of tapes played over and over again. It's apparent the audience is hearing snippets of conversation from the "data retrieval" specialist's mission tapes but will we ever discover the true purpose of the mission?

Entertaining and stylish without being either dumbed down or sexed up, no one who has been troubled by recent headlines or exhilarated by new theatre can afford to miss this.

Komedia, 7.30pm, £12.50/£10