A modern commercial airliner contains around six million parts. Third Angel's show is about what happens if just one of them malfunctions due to human error.
The action - or rather the absence of it - occurs in a space which seems part seminar room, part potting shed. A group of aviation enthusiasts sit hunched over work benches, piecing together model aircraft from plastic kits, while overhead projectors magnify their endeavours.
Though the prospect of witnessing Airfix junkies at work seems about as thrilling as watching glue dry, the juxtaposition of hi-tech presentation and low-grade engineering is what the show is all about. One of the group states that "the history of powered flight is the history of human stupidity", and the modellers casually exchange trivia about notorious near-misses.
The conversation is interspersed with an illustration of the "Swiss cheese" theory of disaster, whereby random small imperfections align to form a gaping hole in which accidents occur. The cast read transcripts from an aviation inquiry, in which a plane crashed on landing because a complex chain of events led to an engineer failing to replace a warning bulb in the cockpit.
All of this tends towards the rather obvious point that we place our faith in fallible technology without having the faintest idea how it works. It is hard to say whether presenting the piece in the week of the 50th anniversary of the Munich air crash, and less than a month since a passenger jet missed the runway at Heathrow, counts as grim prescience or poor timing. But it will give you something to think about before you next board an aircraft. In fact, it will give you approximately six million things to think about.
· Until February 9. Box office: 0114-249 6000.
