FLYBY - A New Musical Will Premiere at Southwark Playhouse Borough
Emily and Daniel are played by Poppy Gilbert and Stuart Thompson.
By: Stephi Wild Jan. 20, 2026
FLYBY is a daring new musical by Theo Jamieson directed and co-created by Adam Lenson. It has its world premiere at Southwark Playhouse Borough on Friday 3 April and runs for six weeks only until Saturday 16 May 2026, with a press night on Thursday 9 April 2026.
Originally developed in 2025 by The National Theatre, FLYBY fuses an intimate and exhilarating love story with the vast and endless loneliness of space. 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 a musical story about the magnetism of desire, the inescapable gravity between two people, and their need to feel deeply - sometimes recklessly - alive.
Emily and Daniel are played by Poppy Gilbert (My Oxford Year - Netflix, The Other Bennett Sister – BBC) and Stuart Thompson (Spring Awakening – Almeida, Radiant Boy - Southwark Playhouse, 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.
Joining Theo and Adam on the creative team are set designer Libby Todd and lighting designer Ben Jacobs.
Theo Jamieson is an award-winning composer, lyricist, writer, orchestrator, arranger, musical supervisor and pianist. His original musical U.Me was commissioned by the BBC and recorded with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in 2021, and a sequel was commissioned and aired in 2024. In 2022 the musical The Famous Five for which he wrote music, lyrics and orchestrations premiered at Theatr Clyd and Chichester Festival Theatre. His awards include the John Halford prize for piano composition and the 2019 Stiles and Drewe prize for Best New Song.
Adam Lenson's previous directing work includes: Cable Street (Southwark Playhouse Borough), Superhero, Wasted, The Rink, The Fabulist Fox Sister (Southwark Playhouse) Public Domain (Vaudeville Theatre), Songs For A New World, Whisper House, 35mm (The Other Palace), Ordinary Days (Trafalgar Studios), Little Fish, Saturn Returns (Finborough Theatre), See What I Wanna See (Jermyn Street Theatre), Dark Tourism (Park Theatre), Shift+Alt+Right (ALP Musicals), The Leftovers (Sheep Soup, National Tour), Stages, Lock & Key (Vault Festival), The Storm (Helios / ENO).
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