By Aline Mahrud

WORTH A LOOK?: **1/2

WHEN?: Friday 3 April, opens 9 April and runs through 16 May 2026 RUNTIME: 110 minutes (without interval)

We’re here because its star Stuart Thompson (Radiant Boy: A Haunting, Southwark Playhouse) is brilliant in everything we’ve seen him in and here plays an unpredictable engineer who disappears into the void.

• Read on for reasons including how the writer/composer has worked with artists including David Byrne and Jacob Collier

It’s an interesting time to see it because the news is full of the Artemis II mission to the moon and what it must be like for an astronaut so far away from home is a thought so many of us must have had over this Easter weekend.

FLYBY is the story of astronaut Daniel Defoe and how he came to be in a craft nicknamed The Ostrich separated from the rest of his crew and seemingly on a one-way mission to nowhere.

That is the set-up and the eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted that this astronaut also shares his name with the author of Robinson Crusoe, an adventure novel published in 1719 about a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical desert island before being rescued.

FLYBY then takes several steps backwards and we meet the younger Daniel and explore his relationship with a woman who is described in the show notes as ‘fiercely intelligent documentary film maker with a complicated past’.

It’s with the arrival of the character of Emily Baker played by Poppy Gilbert that we begin to understand why travelling solo in space on a 1-way ticket to nowhere might prove to be the only rational option for the seemingly outwardly sane Defoe.

FLYBY is a musical and its writer and composer Theo Jamieson has worked with artists as diverse as David Byrne, Fatboy Slim and Jacob Collier.

However, on 1st listen we found there was little to recommend the songs (a selection is included below) and it was the performances of Thompson and Baker of them that were elevating them.

There’s much promise elsewhere in the creative team involved in this production with Adam Lenson (Cable Street, Southwark Playhouse) as co-creator and director and Rupert Young, Olivier Award-nominated for Dear Evan Hansen, playing various characters including Emily’s cheating father.

However FLYBY is so downbeat, reflective and melancholic that we can see why it was developed at the National Theatre but not staged there.

If you’re a fan of new musicals as we are you might find something in FLYBY and Thompson is so committed he’s in tears at its close, although any sobbing we were doing was for the unintentionally hilarious appearance of a very slow moving turtle at its finale.

• Main pictures via Facebook courtesy Southwark Playhouse Tickets
• Have you seen an Old Vic show before and what did you think of this 1? Let us know what you thought in the comments below
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