Colchester: Flights of imagination (From Gazette)

Colchester: Flights of imagination

8:01am Thursday 17th July 2008 in

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The plane coming into land at the Mercury Theatre in Colchester is.... about to be one of the stars of a new play.

Charlie Victor Romeo takes to the Colchester theatre's main stage on Monday and Tuesday next week.

Derived entirely from the Black Box transcripts of real-life airline emergencies, the play is a dramatic insight into the tension-filled cockpits of actual flights in distress.

And the main set of the play is a mock-up of an aeroplane cockpit, and to build it the production team wanted it to be as life-like as possible.

Andy Franks, production manager at the Mercury, said: "The information we got was from A4 drawings sent over from the States, so the first thing we had to do was convert the measurements from imperial to metric.

"We sourced a lot of the material from the internet, so we got the aircraft seats from a guy in Wales and we also managed to get our hands on some decommissioned panels from a Boeing 777.

"It's actually quite a sweet little set and although the nose cone is a lot smaller than a normal aircraft I think the inside will convey the claustrophobic nature of the cockpit."

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