Staged in a rehearsal room backstage at Arts Centre Melbourne, finding your seat for Flight becomes part of the experience. You “check in” in the main foyer and are then taken backstage in a group of eight, where you wait in an entrance area until one by one you are led into the dark room, seated in an individual booth and given a pair of headphones.

The “performance” takes place via a rolling display of miniature dioramas on a huge, slowly turning carousel, each tiny scene lighting up as it reaches you as the story unfolds to a soundtrack on your headphones featuring a narrator (Emun Elliott), dialogue by actors and sound effects.

Flight is adapted by Oliver Emanuel from the novel Hinterland by Australian author Caroline Brothers and tells the story of two young orphaned brothers Aryan and Kabir who leave Afghanistan as refugees, optimistically dreaming of a better life and a good education in England. Farshid Rokey voices the teenaged, protective Aryan, while Nalini Chetty provides the voice of the younger Kabir.

Their journey, as you’d expect, is full of struggle and terrible set-backs as they take to a rickety boat, climb hills, are exploited as lowly paid farm workers, abused by...