Putting on a play on a subject as expansive as flying in, to use that favourite of theatre crit terms, such an ‘intimate’ space as the ADC’s Larkrum Studio – total audience capacity approximately thirty – instantly suggested that it might not…take off (apologies). However, overcoming the village hall connotations of amateur dramatics, the Cambridge ‘Bawds’ put on a not unenjoyable show. Amy Johnson, ‘Britain’s foremost female aviator’ as the programme proudly reads, made for an interesting biographical piece. Starting out in “’ull” where Johnson was born the daughter of local fish merchant, the play gushed out Amy’s career from her first famed flight to Australia (the 80th anniversary of which falls this year) through her uneasy relationship with fellow aviator Jim Mollinson to her untimely death which is enacted with a certain predictability but an effective quietude at the end.

Set of course was an inevitable problem. A backdrop of three printed boards of memorabilia of her career could easily have come across as a bit of a museum piece but instead felt more like the glossy photo pages in an biography – the ones you flick to when the prose isn’t quite holding your attention. Resultantly the intimate scenes of Johnson’s life, a touching proposal scene over dinner working particularly well, were perhaps the most successful (set being slightly less important) but they were nicely spliced with reports of our heroine’s flying exploits in vairy naice darling 1930s RP which the cast hit spot on and which were juxtaposed nicely with the Yorkshire accents of Johnson’s early years in Hull.

At times the perfomance risked the tone of the kind of TV docu-drama interspersed with re-enactment scenes of which the BBC are so fond. Meg Dixon, however, made a comfortable portrayal of Amy depicting very humanly her beguilement with the high life (in all senses of the word). She may at times have been a little too comfortable with an occasional expression or gesture overly expansive for the space available but alongside Guy Holmes’ suitably smooth talking media savvy Jim Mollinson and Neil Coates as the trusty engineer Jack Humphreys, the actors kept the cogs of the script running nicely along. Johnson’s life (and some brilliant sound effects work) made for a pleasant hour of drama. Longer and it might not have been quite so pleasant. Rex Wolford’s script ticked the boxes, had all the necessary quips (“I flew to Hull”. “Oh aye? Next time it’ll be Hell”) and presented in audience friendly bites a (very British) story that not many know.