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 captivating new musical where love, longing and the loneliness of space collide.

Written by Theo Jamieson (RSC) directed and created with Adam Lenson (Cable Street), FLYBY has its world premiere at Southwark Playhouse Borough featuring a contemporary score and an incredible cast.

Emily and Daniel are played by Poppy Gilbert (My Oxford Year – Netflix, The Other Bennett Sister – BBC) and Stuart Thompson (Spring Awakening – Almeida, SAS: Rogue Heroes – BBC) with Gina Beck (Glinda in Wicked – West End, Sarah Brown in Guys & Dolls – The Bridge Theatre) as Amy Greenwood, Rupert Young (Dear Evan Hansen – West End, Bridgerton – Netflix) as Jonathan Jay, and Simbi Akande (Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady – The Mill at Sonning, Hamilton – West End) as Grace Adams.

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 unravelling; and Emily’s struggle to define herself amid talent, ambition, and moral ambiguity.

FLYBY is an exhilarating musical love story about the magnetism of desire, the inescapable gravity between two people, and their need to feel deeply – sometimes recklessly – alive.