⭐⭐
Darkfield FLIGHT at Assembly George Square
Flight, from the team at DARKFIELD, is an immersive audio experience staged inside a shipping container built to look exactly like a full-scale plane cabin. It draws on the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, unfolding across two parallel realities and two possible outcomes of the same journey. Somewhere out there, the blurb promises, this plane lands safely. Somewhere else, who knows.
As a private pilot who flies microlights, I walked in thinking this one was made for me. A fake plane promising something clever about flight and physics? Sold, before I’d even picked up my boarding card.
In a word: weird.
You turn up, get handed a random boarding card with an allocated seat, so you and whoever you came with are split up before you’ve gone in. Doesn’t matter. You sit, put your headphones on, and they shut the door and kill the lights. Not dim. Properly, completely, pitch black.
That’s how you stay for the full thirty minutes, just you, the dark, and whatever’s coming through the headphones: snippets of conversation, cabin service, otherworldly noises, and the nagging question of whether what you’re hearing is actually a plane going down. You’re never quite sure, and that uncertainty does a lot of the heavy lifting.
It’s genuinely creepy when a voice whispers right in your ear, and yes, the container does actually move. But it’s more of a shoogle than a white-knuckle ride, and for long stretches it felt closer to an uneventful theme park ride than the unsettling deep dive I was hoping for. The concept is fascinating. The execution doesn’t quite deliver on it.
Would I do it again? Absolutely not. Would I recommend it? Only if you’ve got nothing else on the list and fancy something completely different. As an experience, it’s unique. As theatre, it left me a bit cold, and considerably more shoogled than shaken.