IN Going Viral, written and performed at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds tonight by Daniel Bye, an aeroplane flies from Uganda to England.

Everyone on board is weeping; everyone except you. On the ground, the weeping spreads. Is it a strange new disease? An outbreak of hysteria? Or has the world become genuinely sad?

"In this uncanny, high-definition world we're all more connected, more vulnerable, and more human but not equally so," says Daniel, the award-winning maker of The Price Of Everything and How To Occupy An Oil Rig, who this time presents an urgent, fantastical story from the front line of an epidemic. Intimate but epic, humorous yet and tragic, Going Viral once more combines Bye‘s trademark blend of storytelling, playful comedy and performance lecture.

"As always, when I'm asked where an idea for a show came from, I say it emerged in stages, rather than leaping into my mind," says Daniel. "I first started working on this one about seven months before the Ebola crisis, so that outbreak really concentrated my mind when I knew I wanted to write about diseases and I wanted to write about how we write about diseases, and the difference when a disease is perceived to be near us or farther way. Then I thought about how the world is connected, and how, as soon as someone with a disease gets on an aeroplane, the spread of that disease can happen.

"But when I reflected on the story I wanted to tell, I realised I didn't want it to be like a stage version of Outbreak, which was preposterous nonsense but very enjoyable, or like Contagion, and I didn't want to do a documentary. I wanted it to be a fantastical piece of magic realism and as soon as I had the idea of weeping as the disease, Going Viral was born."

Tonight's 8pm show has sold out.