Charlie Victor Romeo at Udderbelly's Pasture

Garlanded in America, as much from the aerospace industry where it has been taken up as a training aid, as from the theatre, Charlie Victor Romeo arrives in Edinburgh surfing an ever-growing wave of verbatim theatre.

The source material is the voice recorders recovered from the wreckage of crashed aeroplanes. It ought to be the drabbest theatrical experience imaginable. All you hear is a lot of highly technical jargon on a stage mocked up to look like the cockpit of an aircraft. All you see is the heads and shoulders of the flight crew who are otherwise more or less immobile in front of their instruments.

Nobody comes, nobody goes, except the occasional intervention from the cabin crew. They even look the same from one flight to the next, those crisp white shirts and military style epaulettes. We know nothing about them except how they react to the emergencies in which they find themselves. There is no back story apart from a terse projection which gives the flight name, number and date. There is not even much mystery about what happens next since, in all but one case, what happens next is abrupt, violent death. And is there not something ghoulish about watching the last moments of real people, in many cases wrestling heroically with a stricken aircraft?

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Yet despite all that there is undoubtedly something gripping about each incident. You find yourself desperately urging the crew on to find some sort of solution. The impeccable precision of the performances, and the verisimilitude of Jamie Merenes' award-winning sound design, combine to create an atmosphere of almost unbearable tension.

And it's revealing too, given its unimpeachable authenticity. You certainly don't expect to find the flight crew to be leafing through the instruction manual as the crisis unfolds, nor do you expect the pandemonium that breaks out on the flight deck as a serious problem emerges. Air travel has become a ghastly experience for a number of reasons, but this will be one more reason to make you take the train.

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