The baggage you deposit at airports is all physical. They want your suitcases, holdalls and rucksacks. But to every check-in desk you also bring emotional baggage: memories of those you’ve left behind, anxieties about your journey ahead and fears for your sense of self in the big wide world.

This is the baggage that Grid Iron theatre company asks us to unload. As the final flights of the day touch down, the company is commandeering Edinburgh airport to perform Roam, a show about the mass transit of people through the skies and across borders.

It’s a performance unlike any other, but the director, Ben Harrison, doesn’t simply bus out an audience to a novel space. Rather, he uses that space to comment on today’s globalised world, from consumerism to terrorism, holidaymakers to refugees. The result is a show, co-produced with the National Theatre of Scotland, as politically pertinent as it is thrilling — and one more highlight in Grid Iron’s glittering 10-year career.

It starts with a bus parked outside the Traverse theatre, where not only our tickets but our passports are checked. A young woman standing by a box of confiscated knives asks me if I can identify what she is holding — a tomato. This is a precursor to a scene later in the evening that lampoons the government’s citizenship questionnaire and the idea that national identity can be learnt by rote. I guess correctly and am allowed on board.

This combination of the playful (a tomato) and the serious (the ignominy of immigration) is typical of what follows. At times, it is like watching two plays at once. On the one hand are breezy cameos of cavorting pensioners on a bucket holiday and air hostesses with blonde bobs and turquoise outfits line-dancing to a groovy 1960s jazz soundtrack.

On the other are desperate images of fleeing refugees trying to escape a war-torn Scotland to take shelter in — spot the irony — Sarajevo, Kigali or Beirut. Depending on the passenger, the check-in desks are benign or threatening. At its best, the show blurs the difference. We laugh at the announcement that “children may be removed and destroyed at any time”, but, after seeing the interrogation of a Palestinian traveller, we’re less certain about the one saying: “Please do not leave your home unoccupied at any time.”

In this way, Harrison presents a snapshot of an air-bound world in which businessman and terrorist, sun-worshiper and asylum-seeker share the same space. It is a space that pays little regard to the niceties of national identity — Andrew Clark explaining what it is to be Scottish with the aid of an Oor Wullie bucket or Itxaso Moreno trying to differentiate between Spain and the Basque country — but it does understand commerce and the lure of the duty-free gift shop.

All this is performed in situ: at the same check-in desks you’ve used yourself, only with the monitors overridden to display images of exotic locations and close-ups of the multinational team of actors. The performance leads us round the baggage carousels and up to the departure lounge, passing real travellers puzzled to see a Chilean guitarist, a gang of forlorn children or an angel pass them by.

If, in its final stages, Roam feels a little too long and too elliptical, the overriding sensation is of an imaginative flight, rich in detail and deep in philosophical thought. It is a soaraway success.

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