“A fun (and rather scary) experience that will certainly appeal to many people”
This is part of a series of shorter reviews from Edinburgh Fringe, August 2026.
Taking place in a shipping container, decked out on the inside to look like a commercial aeroplane, ‘Flight’ delivers a masterclass in sound design as we are plunged into pitch darkness for twenty minutes and taken for the ride of our lives. Wearing noise-cancelling headphones, we are treated to a soundscape that makes it feel as though we are surrounded by air hostesses and other passengers. In the darkness, we begin to picture this most mundane of situations. And then, everything starts to get a bit weird.
When your seat first begins to judder, you may think it is just standard turbulence. But then the in-flight duty free offerings change, questions are answered that were never posed, and other passengers accuse us of being in their seat. We have fallen through time, into another universe where everything is very similar but not quite the same. The plane screeches between timestreams, people scream and luggage falls from the cabins above. You may find yourselves clutching at the arms of your seat as the tension grows.
The attempts at linking these ideas with quantum theory feel a little heavy-handed at times. The main notion is that there are two possible outcomes to any flight (it either lands safely or it crashes) and that whilst we are in the air, both of those outcomes coexist together. This is the exact theory that forms the main crux of quantum mechanics, where quantum particles exist in multiple states simultaneously prior to observation. But spelling this out to us via the idea of Schrodinger’s cat perhaps unnecessarily convolutes the idea further, using a different metaphor to explain a metaphor not providing the clearest exposition. This is a fun (and rather scary) experience that will certainly appeal to many people, but may not land the message it carries quite as well as it wants to.
Tom Morley, August 2026
“FLIGHT” plays every 30 minutes at Assembly George Square until 31st August.
Broken Legs Blog 