Michele's first ever national review   The Daily Telegraph, January 20, 1983.          THE BEST OF BRIXTON It may be crude, it may be  untidy and rough, but "Riot Party" at the Young Vic is also the first play I have come across to dramatise the Brixton riots of 1981 and give some sense of the passions behind that alarming event.  The play won the first prize of £750 in a competition sponsored by this theatre's World Wildlife Fund on the theme of decay in the inner city. The author is Michele Celeste, a young Italian  philosophy student who in his  three years in this country has  kept himself, learned English  and studied at close quarters  the festering relations between the black community and the authorities. When the police suspect they have found a petrol bomb factory, they wreck the home of a young West Indian, Leroy, and arrest his father. However his friends, both black and  white, clear up the mess and help him to celebrate his engagement to an Irish girl, Diana. The party is interrupted by the arrival from the rioting streets outside of a wounded  policeman stabbed by Leroy to  revenge his Dad's arrest. Diana breaks oft with him in horror.  Leroy, touched by the youth and helplessness of the boy he has almost killed, attempts to save his life when rioters set the building on fire.      It is a naive enough fable, but has the double merit of sharp characterization and an impartial view of the crisis. The impatience of the beleaguered police it dealt with as sympathetically as the predicament of the blacks. Their eruption of rage is seen as partly due to the community's neglect, but above all to their frustration  at being left ignorant by an inadequate and unimaginative education. These feelings are given some eloquence by the young company's best speaker, Tracy Brown, and interesting performances come from Francis Elliot as a shifty white looter and Treva Etienne as the disturbed and excitable Leroy.  JOHN BARBER

Michele's first ever national feature       THE GUARDIAN, July 17, 1982        ItaIian riot acts for the British playgoer           Discovering unknown playwrights is a tricky business at the best of times but the World Wildlife Fund can congratulate itself: those it has discovered this week are more unknown than most.           In a drive to introduce the problems of conservation into popular culture, the Fund, Lloyds Bank and the Young Vic joined forces to offer prizes for plays about the environment.  Ivan Hattingh (of the WWF), Frank Dunlop of the Young Vic where the plays will be shown, and John Mortimer, barrister and playwright, were the judges and all 150 or so entries were carefully screened pseudonymously to stop people instinctively favouring the names they knew           It worked. The first prize was for a play about the riots in Brixton : "A play with real life and energy"  (John Mortimer). It was called Riot Party. by one Michele Celeste. The Judges braced themselves for a number of possibilities but they were'nt ready for a 30 year old classical guitarist from Apuleia in Southern Italy who has spent only three years in England and who arrived with a degree in philosophy but relatively little English.      He worked for a while as porter at Kings College Hospital and he says. wrote plays and sent them to ITV. Who sent them back. This is his flrst work to achieve any recognition. He was rather shaken, he says, by the riot. Italians did not appreciate that such things could happen in a stylish city like London.  He is to take up a grant to study to become teacher but at the moment he is unemployed and the £ 750 prize will help keep him alive.