Architecting

Subtitled Part One to suggest that its collaborative development may still not be complete, this co-production of the National Theatre of Scotland and the American company the Team is a fluid and inventive meditation on America’s past and its uneasy relationship with the conflicting impulses to embrace and erase it.

In a New Orleans roadhouse reality is shared by the living, the ghost of Margaret Mitchell, the characters from Gone With the Wind, and Henry Adams, the 19th century historian paradoxically enamoured of both medieval cathedrals and the vision of America’s future. Add to them an architect planning to replace hurricane ruins with a ‘new traditional’ suburb designed to recreate feelings of the past and a film producer planning an updated remake of GWTW, and the play has rich material for exploring myth, history and the fantasy of progress.

Mitchell envies Adams' objectivity, but he had to repress his imagination and humanity to find it, and simply omitted 20 uncomfortable years from his famous autobiography. The film producer considers Mitchell a racist and tries to erase all images of slavery from his film, but his African-American director actually responds to her myth-making power. Real world characters find themselves drawn into the reality of the book, while Scarlett and the others respond to the 21st century.

Under Rachel Chavkin’s fluid direction, this group-created work juggles its many levels of reality and points of reference remarkably well for about two thirds of its length, drawing the audience in to its landscape and unforcedly raising its questions and issues. But then everything abruptly changes as most of the characters disappear, a new set of wholly realistic figures are introduced, and their stories, which deal with a trip to New Orleans which may have overtones of a quest for the past, are told in a wholly new stage vocabulary of film, dance and cartoonish satire.

The play never really recovers from that loss of coherence, however interesting the new characters or beautiful the new stage pictures, and the points it raises about America not being quite so eager to erase or rewrite its often messy past may be lost in the confusion.