Coincidentally topical, with Artemis II in the news this past week, Theo Jamieson and Adam Lenson’s new musical Flyby concerns an astronaut who drifts very far from home – and asks us to piece together why.
After a slightly misplaced opening jump scare (this is not, despite brief suggestion, a horror), three narrators set the scene for Lenson’s production. Daniel DeFoe (Stuart Thompson), a name that nods to another fictional castaway, has stolen a spacecraft, The Ostrich, and gone off-grid on what appears to be a one-way mission to nowhere. The question of why is teased out through flashbacks, data logs and intermittent narration from Gina Beck, Rupert Young and Simbi Akande that feels, for the most part, unnecessary.
In the past Daniel falls for documentary film-maker Emily Baker (Poppy Gilbert, of The Other Bennett Sister), a woman of fierce, sometimes supercilious intellect. Their relationship unfurls through familiar markers: the first trip away, the hike, the move-in, all staged across Libby Todd's minimal living room set and aided by swift costume changes (Eleanor Bull). It's the bright-eyed period when intellectual sparring feels like foreplay and each other's flaws are still endearing, until, of course, they're not.
Emily can be morally superior, a bit of a bully – she carries the weight of being daughter to a celebrated, philandering filmmaker, and is both product and critic of a certain artistic ego. Gilbert is magnetic in the role, as believable in a teenage flashback as she is leaving voicemails into the silence of a broken relationship. Thompson, by contrast, is more opaque. His kneejerk volatility, an underdeveloped reflex toward cruelty born of half-articulated repression, never gathers the same gravitational pull.
The songs have gone unmentioned so far for a reason – they're the weakest thing here, which is a problem in a musical. One or two land, a solo from Gilbert in particular, but you won't be singing anything on the way home. That said, Jamieson's compositional skill is evident: much of the atmosphere is carried by a partially concealed live band, alongside retro-cosmic projections and Ben Jacobs' lighting.
Things come properly unstuck when Thompson's character has an apparent epiphany prompted by an animatronic turtle (which is, in fact, a very slow-moving person in a turtle suit). Still, there are moments of genuine tear-jerking emotion that keep Flyby aloft. But if you're after propulsive space drama, this is neither Project Hail Mary nor particularly memorable.
