London Theater Journal: The Empire Crumbles

Robert Day A scene from “Mission Drift.”

LONDON â€" The empire is so over. No, not the British one. That’s been dead for ages. I mean the American one, which I have now had the chance to watch disintegrating on both sides of the Thames. My first show in London was Lucy Kirkwood’s sold-out “Chimerica” (at the Almeida in Islington), which portrayed the waxing of the East (as in China) versus the waning of the West (as in you know where).

When I slipped over to the South Bank the other night, to the National Theater, I was treated to the spectacle of the American dream evaporating like a mirage in the desert or Las Vegas, to be exact. That was in a musical called “Mission Drift,” which for the month of June has occupied the Shed, a provisional structure set up by the National in its courtyard while its Cottesloe Theater (soon to be reincarnated as the Dorfman) is being revamped.

The Shed turned out to be the perfect spot for this lively production from the theatrical collective called the TEAM. (You’ll probably like its members better if you don’t know what the acronym stands for.) For “Mission Drift” makes the case that the United States is a temporary set-up, too, at least as a nation of endless reach and endless opportunity.

Unlike “Chimerica,” a British production, “Mission Drift” is American-born. It was staged at the COIL Festival in New York last year, where it! was astutely reviewed by my colleague Charles Isherwood. I decided to see “Mission Drift” basically because I wanted to spend some time in the Shed (which sounds kind of sinister, doesn’t it?). And yes, it was appealingly shedlike, though far more comfortable than anything Stella Gibbons might have envisioned for her “Cold Comfort Farm.”

But I also wound up having a high old time at “Mission Drift,” along with the mostly, refreshingly young audience that packed the place. Directed by Rachel Chavkin (who staged the New York hit “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” - and written by the TEAM, in collaboration with Heather Christian and Sarah Gancher - “Mission Drift” finds plenty of show-biz spark in a world of ashes

The show tracks four centuries of American pioneering as it follows a Dutch husband and wife (both eternally 14, and immortal) from little old New Amsterdam in the 1600s across a series of new frontiers. They end up in Las Vegas, building an empire of hotels meant to include their chef d’oeuvre, the Ark. (Apocalypse anyone?)

But they’re derailed in 2008 by the housing bust, which also takes its toll on the show’s second couple, a 21st-century cocktail waitress and the cowboy who loves her. Libby King and Brian Hastert play the forever-young Dutch kids, who keep changing their names but not their entrepreneurial spirit. And Amber Gray and Ian Lassiter are the latter-day casualties of their predecessors’ pioneering.

“Mission Drift” is as thick on economic and historical data as it is on allegory, which could be tedious. This is largely avoided, thanks to the presence of a jaded, sultry lounge singer named Miss Atomic. (Well, you knew that atomic bomb testing would figure ! in this, ! didn’t you?) She is portrayed by Ms. Christian, who has written a tasty slew of torchy, bluesy, burning-down-the house numbers for her and the TEAM troupe to sing and dance to.

So maybe toward the end, when the show mostly exchanges singing for sermonizing, I started to feel the weight of the centuries and the previous couple of hours. But having seen six full-length shows in four days, I was grateful for the opportunity to watch talented and dedicated young things playing in the sand (which is kept onstage in bottles to be spilled when the occasion requires) and drinking beer. Yeah, beer. That’s what we call it back in the States.

Johan Persson Simon Russell Beale in “The Hothouse.”

Whskey was the tipple on offer in the other state-of-a-nation show I caught that day, in a matinee at Trafalgar Studios. That amber-colored fuel (or its simulacrum) was deployed most entertainingly by the great Simon Russell Beale, who stars in Jamie Lloyd’s revival of “The Hothouse” by Harold Pinter. Mr. Beale’s character gets drunk on the stuff, for sure, but he also flings it repeatedly - and with crack vaudeville timing - into the face of a snidely insinuating employee.

The nation under the microscope in this case is Great Britain in the late 1950s, which is, it seems, already a madhouse run by the insane. (Told you the empire was long gone.) This early work from Pinter is set in a sanitarium where the patients are known only as numbers and have a way of mysteriously disappearing or becoming pregnant.

Itâ€! ™s hard f! or the man in charge, Roote (Mr. Beale), to keep them all straight, and he would appear to be having the sort of full-fledged nervous breakdown that befalls dim-witted, rule-obsessed bureaucrats in satires of that era. Eyes in full bulge and brow in full beetle, Mr. Beale sputters and fulminates expertly through a series of music-hall-style encounters with employees played by a sly-footed John Simm, a sly-curved Indira Varma and a sly-tongued John Heffernan.

These characters have monosyllabic names to match their personalities: Gibbs, Cutts and Lush. And the innocent new worker there, played by Harry Melling of the “Harry Potter” films, is called Lamb. He is sacrificed, needless to say, and in ways that anticipate Pinter’s late-career examinations of political torture.

Mr. Lloyd’s production, designed with moody end-of-days shabbiness by Soutra Gilmour, is better at conveying the comedy than the terror. (Ian Rickson’s revival for the National in 2007 was more successfully double-edged.) Written in 1958, and put aside by its author for more than two decades, “The Hothouse” shows a young writer under the influence of absurdist predecessors.

Might these have included “The Goon Show”? Featuring more outright slapstick and dizzy dialogue than any of Mr. Pinter’s later plays, “The Hothouse” suggests that the master of the comedy of menace might have pursued an alternate career as a writer for Monty Python. The interest for Pinter purists lies in looking for clues of things to come, particularly in the portrayal of Woman.

She is lusciously embodied by Ms. Varma as an artificial erotic construct, who crosses and uncrosses her legs in beguiling and threatening ways that foreshadow the Sphinx wife of “The Homecoming.” ! Mr. Simmâ! €™s balletic footwork of obsequiousness and officiousness is a treat.

Mr. Beale, his generation’s most complex Hamlet, reminds us that he can deliver lunacy in more keys than one. And this “Hothouse,” like “Mission Drift,” reminds us of the theatrical energy to be minded from enervated empires.