Charlie Victor Romeo

Taking its title from the initials of Cockpit Voice Recorder, the infamous black box that survives airplane crashes, this group-created piece takes verbatim theatre in a direction no one had previously dared, by staging the final moments of six airline accidents, all but one of them catastrophic. A cast of seven rotate in the small cockpit set as projections identify each plane and introduce us to the moments before something goes wrong.

Despite a mounting body count, the surprising effect is a reassuring one. While in a couple of cases the crews have no time at all to react to the emergency, when they do, we watch them generally responding with admirable courage and ingenuity.

The one exception is a 1996 Peruvian plane whose crew are so dependant on the onboard computers that they resist taking manual control when the systems fail, instead frantically searching through the instruction book for help. In contrast, the pilots of a 1985 Japan Air Lines plane and of a 1989 United flight prove extraordinarily valiant and ingenious in finding ways around the equipment’s failures, in the one case unsuccessfully, in the other managing to fly a plane with virtually no working controls.

With suspense and tension built into the situations, directors and actors successfully convey both the stress and the professionalism of their briefly sketched-in characters.