Evelyn Waugh had three paintings he called The Pleasures of Travel. The first showed a highwayman holding up a coach; the second, the calm of a Victorian railway carriage. But it was number three he relished most. Commissioned from Richard Eurich, the canvas depicted an aeroplane cabin at the moment it becomes clear a catastrophic failure is occurring. Waugh habitually paused before it when showing guests round the house, gleefully exclaiming: “They’re all doomed!”

You suspect that the old cur- mudgeon might have appreciated the extended memento mori that is Charlie Victor Romeo (Udderbelly Cow Barn, 4 stars). This is not an evening for those who are afraid of flying. Based on transcripts from cockpit voice recorders — the “black boxes” used in air-crash investigations — the New York company Collective:Unconscious has created a gripping piece of verbatim theatre. Unless you happen to be a pilot, you are unlikely to understand all the dialogue, but the human drama is unmistakable. Without doubt, part of the fascination is voyeuristic: the cheap thrill of watching the living dead. But there is something more noble going on. Faces rictus tight, sweat beading on brows — the air crews’ struggles to stay in control take on an existential quality. The result is not just a docudrama about keeping planes in the air, but an age-old story about heroically trying to beat the odds in the face of a universe often arbitrary and cruel.

I’m not sure what it says about this year’s Fringe when a play about aviation disasters is one of the cheerier things I’ve seen. With the exception of a spirited adaptation of Carl Hiaasen’s Lucky You (Assembly Rooms, 3 stars), Waugh’s “They’re all doomed” seems to sum up my week. It may just be the luck of the draw, but, so far at least, the new, slimmed-down Traverse programme seems particularly gloomy. The third part of Zinnie Harris’s trilogy about the after-effects of war, Fall (Traverse, 2 stars), is a facile, unwieldy attempt to explore the rights and wrongs of capital punishment in war-crimes trials. It is an inauspicious start to Dominic Hill’s career at the theatre’s helm.

Don’t expect light relief from Nocturne (Traverse, 3 stars), either. The American Adam Rapp first came to Fringe attention with the stoner comedy Finer Noble Gases, but this monologue about a writer living with the consequences of decapitating his little sister in a car accident is overlong and overpolished, in a way that jars with the messiness of its subject matter.

That’s not an accusation one could level at Pornography (Traverse, 3 stars). Simon Stephens has set his new play in July 2005, when the euphoria of London’s bid winning the Olympics gave way almost immediately to the horror of the 7/7 bombings. Yet he resists the temptation to hinge his story on any simple before/after contrast. Instead, we’re offered vignettes of city life, written to be performed in whatever order the director desires. A lonely widow sits late into the night watching pornography. A brother and sister embark on an incestuous relationship. A racist fantasises about one of his teachers while one of the bombers recounts a final journey.

The set is as stark and unadorned as a backstage. Electric bulbs above the audience flicker and the crackle of static fills the air. This is a stark portrait of a city built on the sum of its neuroses. In this atomised society, perspective is lost and the obsessions of the terrorist appear scarcely less strange than everyone else’s.

Flawlessly acted, Pornography is long on atmosphere: whether that’s enough to satisfy will depend on how much you believe it's theatre’s job to make sense of life’s chaos, rather than to reflect it.

For a more conventional take on the pitfalls of urban life, try Coming up for Air (Assembly, 4 stars). Elegantly adapted from George Orwell’s 1939 novel, it features a pitch-perfect performance from the comedian Hal Cruttenden as George Bowling, the tubby insurance salesman rebelling against his stultifying suburban life.

If there are silver linings to the clouds hanging over the Traverse, they seem to be Irish ones. Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus (Traverse, 4 stars) interweaves three monologues to tell the story of a serial killer who has made a pact with the devil in modern-day Dublin. Written in restlessly energetic verse, and beautifully performed in the Abbey Theatre’s production, it blends the domestic with the supernatural pleasingly.

The New Electric Ballroom (Traverse, 4 stars) finds Enda Walsh treading similar ground to last year’s The Walworth Farce. Three sisters in a remote fishing village obsessively re-enact the night when two of them had their hearts broken. Less raucous than last year’s dark hit, it’s also in some ways bleaker, denying all possibility of escaping the past. This is true not just for the two older women, but for the youngest sister, too, emotionally stunted not by anything that happened to her directly, but by the stories she has heard since childhood from her siblings. The writer’s direction draws fine performances from all three women, as well as from the endearingly lost Mikel Murfi as a singing fishmonger.

Based on the memoirs of Spike Milligan’s long-term business manager, Norma Farnes, Surviving Spike (Assembly, 3 stars) is the story of a 30-year professional relationship that in many ways resembled a marriage. By casting Michael Barrymore as Milligan, the producers are teasing the audience to draw comparisons between two famously troubled comedians from different eras. It sort of works, but not as you might expect. Barrymore’s performance is at times oddly muted, lacking the manic intensity on which he built his career. Indeed, he bursts into life fully only in a scene where he performs Milligan’s material directly to the audience.

Still, that’s preferable to the gurning caricature we might have been given, and Jill Halfpenny, as the Yorkshire-born Farnes, has a tough but tender charm that is hard to resist. If Surviving Spike hardly mines the darkness at the heart of its subject, it’s an entertaining enough way to while away an hour or so. In a year in which doom and gloom seems to have infiltrated so much of the Fringe, that is not to be sniffed at.