“Are you all totally deranged?” cries a strained voice, possibly from the cockpit intercom. I say ‘possibly’ because there’s such a commotion on-stage it’s hard to tell. Naturally the only answer to this first question is a resounding ‘yes’.

‘Deranged’ is not, however, intended to be an insult. Pilot is quite brilliant in its madness. In writing the script for the three-man, one-act, one-scene play, Ben Rowse has played a blinder. The dialogue is about as fast-paced as one of the Olympic athletes whose names keep cropping up in this topical (hopefully not portentous) piece, rocketing from one bizarre pseudo-Socratic discussion to another.

The comic timing of both the text and performers is,  so spot-on that you find yourself unquestionably accepting conclusions like “but astronauts are just shit aliens” and “my life is basically an etch-a-sketch”. The three wonderfully insane characters could almost be reflections of a single, addled, two-in-the-morning-in-week-five brain, so strange are the patterns of their conversations.

Adam Lawrence’s Captain James Marshall is particularly fantastic. Marshall is a character with no internal filter. A mass of Freudian slips (think of the fun to be had with ‘cockpit’) in an ill-fitting captain’s jacket, Lawrence gives a performance that begs for pity from the audience – and gets it, when they’re not laughing at his predicament.

Ben Pope and Dominic Biddle give superb performances as, respectively, the surrealist masterpiece that is Arnold Portcullis and cocky (no pun intended) work experience boy Harry Potter. I kid you not. Apparently, there are twenty of them in the country.  

I am always slightly wary of five-star ratings – can any production really be perfect? Well, this is about as close as it gets; everything, from the costumes (which become dishevelled within about five minutes) to the set, smacks of technical excellence and the performers are stellar. If you need something to alleviate your fifth-week blues, look no further.