FLYBY

“Could you build me a distant lighthouse, with you the light to guide me home?”
 
Originally developed in 2025 by the National Theatre, FLYBY is a daring new musical fusing an intimate and exhilarating love story with the vast and endless loneliness of space.
 
Written by Theo Jamieson (RSC) directed and created with Adam Lenson (‘Cable Street’), FLYBY has its world premiere at Southwark Playhouse Borough for 6 weeks only.
 
This new musical features a contemporary score and an incredible cast – Poppy Gilbert (‘Chloe’ (BBC One), ‘My Oxford Year’ (Netflix)), Stuart Thompson (‘Spring Awakening’ (Almeida), ‘Radiant Boy’ (Southwark Playhouse Borough)), Gina Beck (‘Guys & Dolls’, ‘Wicked’), Rupert Young (‘Dear Evan Hansen’, ‘Bridgerton’ (Netflix)), and Simbi Akande (‘Hamilton’, ‘Light in the Piazza’).
 
At its centre are Daniel, a brilliant but unpredictable engineer who disappears into the void, and Emily, a fiercely intelligent documentary film maker with a complicated past.
As the narrative shifts between past and present, we uncover the tangled forces that drove him there – Daniel and Emily’s passionate, combustible relationship; his growing psychological unraveling; and Emily’s struggle to define herself amid talent, ambition, and moral ambiguity.
 
FLYBY is a musical story about the magnetism of desire, the inescapable gravity between two people, and their need to feel deeply – sometimes recklessly – alive.