Scots design another winner with Architecting

What a joy the National Theatre of Scotland continues to be. Its 2006 debut at the Fringe, with Black Watch, recently revived to great acclaim at the Barbican, showed that Vicky Featherstone's company meant business. Now a collaboration with New York theatre company TEAM provides another highly original work searing with energy and commitment.

Architecting is an insightful analysis of the American psyche and explores parallels between the reconstruction of the South after the American Civil War and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, using time jumps, multimedia, physical theatre, speech and music in a production that feels like a force of nature itself.

We are in an New Orleans bar struggling to stay in business after Katrina. New York architect Carrie (Libby King) arrives with an eviction notice so the developers - "disaster capitalists" - can build a TND (traditional new development), the oxymoronic style of homes so beloved by modern architects bereft of ideas.

In the bar are historian Henry Adams and Margaret Mitchell, writer of Gone with the Wind. Interwoven with goings-on in the bar are other stories, chief among them a remake of the 1939 film starring Clark Gable being made by a creative team struggling to portray the uncomfortable truths about the old South's slave-based economy in Mitchell's book.

Architecting is brimful of ideas but perhaps a little too much is happening: some points are made repeatedly and this two-hour piece could easily be 15 minutes shorter. But it's a witty and frequently surrealist piece delivered with verve and the attractive young company put their heart and soul into Rachel Chavkin's exhilarating production. By the end, the set has been destroyed, the cast are sweating profusely and barely catching their breath and the audience are ready for a lie-down.

Until 24 August (0131 228 1404, www.traverse.co.uk)

Architecting
Traverse
Edinburgh Festival