It would be easy to throw critical insults (self-indulgent? verbose?) at this weird meditation on American destruction and almost equally disastrous reconstruction — especially as it ran ten minutes when it first appeared in New York and now lasts almost three hours.

But a play that deadens the bottom genuinely stimulates the mind. It’s overlong, surreal, confusing, imaginative, cluttered and beautifully acted by six cast members who rather offputtingly call themselves the TEAM, meaning Theatre of the American Moment.

Actually, two American moments come under the scrutiny of the TEAM and its co-producer, the National Theatre of Scotland. One is the aftermath of Katrina, the devastating hurricane of 2005. The other is nothing less than the Civil War. That explains why the daughter of a recently dead architect is in New Orleans, selling the myriad houses in the vast gated community he has been building on land reclaimed from the floods. That’s also why Gone with the Wind, complete with Scarlett O’Hara and unisex corsets, figures so heavily in the first half.

At times I wished that the TEAM would learn to love simplicity, but they would doubtless reply that there’s nothing straightforward about American society or American culture. No wonder Lana Lesley’s Margaret Mitchell, who is raised from the dead to observe the impact of her book, looks so disoriented.

Gone with the Wind celebrates Southern grace, attacking the crude racism of the Yankee victors, yet itself now seems racist in its displays of affection for those “children”, the O’Haras’ devoted servants. And the Hollywood producer who plans a politically correct new film of the novel, with Martin Luther King’s ancestor battling for better wages, is an odious opportunist.

The TEAM take an infectious glee in contradictions like these, though they come close to condemning Phoenix Meadows, the New Orleans new town that sounds like a fake-traditional theme park. Certainly, the black man who fled Katrina only to find his home turned into a museum piece on his return makes his feelings clear by burning the house down. But the TEAM’s script and Rachel Chavkin’s production are so busy interweaving stories, songs, ideas, impressions that it’s hard to feel for him — or for the needy girl who, in a subplot, goes to New Orleans for a Scarlett O’Hara lookalike contest.

But while my bum ached, my spirit rose at the quality of actors — notably Frank Boyd who plays the movie tycoon, Rhett Butler and a dim garage-hand, and Libby King as the architect’s flummoxed kid and in several lesser roles. And the conclusion? A model of the second Chartres Cathedral pointedly reappears. The French got that wonderfully right. Americans find reconstruction tougher.

Box office: 020-7638 8891, to Nov 14

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