Mission Drift

The National’s temporary Shed space has four chimneys protruding from its roof, and they seem to be sending up smoke signals that something decisively different is happening here. After Rob Drummond’s extraordinary, death-defying Bullet Catch, which transferred from Glasgow’s Arches and Edinburgh’s Traverse, it is now hosting this 2011 Edinburgh hit from Brooklyn-based company The Team.

Mission Drift is a highly original and distinctive piece that provides a bracing theatrical snapshot of the current crisis engulfing American capitalism, as epitomised by the fate and state of Las Vegas.

Like all the best forms of political theatre, this is refracted through history and the personal stories it tells of people caught up directly in its wake. As the company’s own mission statement puts it, their work “crashes American history and mythology into modern stories to illuminate the current moment”.

The Team tells the story of a place which had been the fastest growing city in America at the turn of the millennium, but was the epicentre of a housing crisis when they visited it in June 2010. They moved into a foreclosed home – marked, they say in a programme note, “by a white piece of paper taped to the door. Nearly every third house in our neighbourhood had one”.

This is a portrait of a city a long way beyond the glitz and glamour of the prestige casino hotels on the Vegas Strip, where we meet Joan, a 32-year-old cocktail waitress at one of them who has just been laid off from her job. She also volunteers at the Neon Boneyard, a haunting and haunted real-life museum of old signs from lost hotels there – “the fragile bones of electric dinosaurs”, as she labels them here.

I’ve visited the Neon Boneyard myself, and it’s supremely evocative. So is this play, as it conjures, through music and the overlapping collisions of past and present it sets up, stories of the lives of its residents, including Chris, a native American who has recently lost his home and is now living in a hotel.

“There are people living in tent farms up by Red Rock. It’s like The Grapes of Wrath some mornings,” Joan says as her world implodes. Her story is paralleled with the story of two Dutch settlers who journey over – apparently in 1624 – to make their fortunes here. (That Las Vegas wasn’t reached by European Amercians until 1829 need not detain us.)

Is this intelligent or indulgent, bold or bewildering? It’s probably all of them at times. The dizzying theatrical bravura of the piece, however, keeps you fascinated and on edge throughout. It is played with a loose, free-form energy by the cast of six, with Heather Christian (who is also the composer) outstanding as she provides a musical narrative from the piano as Miss Atomic.