With the crew of Artemis II hurtling back to Earth after travelling further into space than anyone else in history, it feels timely for Theo Jamieson and Adam Lenson’s new musical Flyby to open at Southwark Playhouse. The programme promises “a love story set against the loneliness of space, and a character study wrapped inside a cosmic metaphor”. Sadly, Flyby is none of these things.
Instead, it struggles to find a coherent narrative at all. There is a persistent sense that the piece does not know what story it is trying to tell, or even which story it wants. Where we touch down is with Daniel Defoe, an engineer training to be an astronaut, who gets accepted onto a mission and then locks himself inside a spacecraft, jettisoning himself deep into space, travelling further than anyone else in human history, all apparently because of a failed relationship with a woman named Emily.
At first glance this feels like an extreme overreaction, until we meet Emily. She is written as so relentlessly unpleasant that Daniel’s desire to get as far away from her as humanly possible, in the most literal sense, begins to seem almost logical. This is presumably by design, but it raises immediate questions about what the audience is supposed to invest in emotionally. It is difficult to anchor yourself to a love story when neither half of it feels remotely lovable.
The problem is not one-sided. Daniel himself is similarly unappealing. We meet the pair already in a relationship, holed up in a rustic Airbnb, but we are given no context for how or why they are together. We never learn how long they have been a couple, and as the musical progresses we are never given so much as a clue. The result is that there is little reason to care when things begin to fall apart.
Despite what its marketing suggests, much of Flyby is not set against the loneliness of space but in someone’s living room, where Emily and Daniel spend an exhausting amount of time sniping at one another, bickering and engaging in drawn-out philosophical debates. These scenes feel designed to explain why the two characters are so emotionally damaged, but they are delivered with a heavy hand and little subtlety. One song positions itself as a dark mirror to Every Brilliant Thing, swapping that play’s life-affirming list for a catalogue of 2000 childhood traumas Daniel claims to have endured. If being “forced” to peel sprouts or tidy your room counts as trauma, it is something of a wonder that we are not all strapping ourselves into rockets.
Emily’s backstory is more developed, though no less clichéd. She is a nepo baby who witnessed her father’s infidelity, a formative experience that the show suggests has turned her into a sociopathic bully. Rupert Young does strong work in the role of the father, largely because he is given something approaching emotional complexity. Gina Beck and Simbi Akande, by contrast, are criminally underused.
Together, Beck, Young and Akande function as a kind of Greek chorus, stepping into almost every scene to explain what we have just seen or what we are about to see. At times this is spoken rather than sung, lending sections of the show the air of a Netflix documentary or a TED Talk. But it feels too much science and not enough fiction, and the overall tone remains stubbornly inconsistent. A supposed late emotional reveal is staged so awkwardly that it prompted suppressed laughter rather than catharsis.
Jamieson’s score is, in isolation, often very beautiful. There is a clear musical intelligence at work, but it is let down by opaque lyrics and muddled narrative framing. A song about sitting still exemplifies the issue. Tellingly, on press night there was no applause between numbers, likely because it was unclear where one song ended and the next began.
For all its flaws, Flyby is rescued to some extent by its two leads. Poppy Gilbert delivers a fiercely polished performance as Emily Baker. The character may be repellent, but Gilbert’s command of the role makes her magnetically watchable, even if that magnetism only sharpens the character’s abrasiveness. Stuart Thompson gives a tour-de-force performance as Daniel, filled with nervous energy and quiet restraint. It is largely through Thompson’s portrayal that the promised loneliness of space finally registers, even when the script fails to provide it.
Libby Todd’s set and Eleanor Bull’s costumes are consistently impressive. Projections are used effectively to evoke the vastness of space, and Bull’s astronaut costume looks reassuringly professional and realistic, grounding the more abstract ideas in something tangible.
Flyby may ultimately prove divisive. There were visible moments of emotion from some audience members, but many more seemed perplexed by what was unfolding. The creative team are clearly ambitious and aiming high, but ambition alone is not enough. Flyby reaches for the stars, yet without a clear trajectory it drifts, and it is only the exceptional cast that stop this journey into the void from feeling entirely weightless.
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