Flyology, Union Theatre, Southwark - Review

★★★★★

Flyology at the Union Theatre in Southwark is a razor-sharp feminist musical that fuses AI dystopia with historical rebellion. Armed with nothing more than a piano, four on-stage performers, and a fiercely intelligent script, it asks a deceptively simple question: if history is an editorial decision, who’s been left out, and who gets to rewrite it?

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Callum, a tech bro obsessed with optimisation, has created an AI system designed to eliminate disruption and engineer a frictionless future. When the system glitches, it pulls three historical figures into the present: Ada Lovelace, Ethel Smyth, and Emmeline Pankhurst, rendered with full awareness of who they are and what they represent. As Callum attempts to regain control, the women begin to interrogate both the system and their own legacies, refusing to be reduced to the simplified versions history has preserved.

What makes Flyology compelling is that it understands exactly what it is. This is not a sprawling epic or a psychologically dense character study; it’s a celebration. A loud, funny, unapologetically theatrical act of reclamation. The show doesn’t pretend to be subtle; it leans into its sci-fi glitch-meets-feminist-riot aesthetic, using direct address, sharp tonal shifts, and knowingly contemporary humour to keep the audience engaged. By refusing to merely honour or adore, the production allows these women to exist as people rather than icons.

Ashleigh Cassidy (Ethel Smyth), Meg Abbott (Ada Lovelace), and Aishling Jones (Emmeline Pankhurst). Photo Credit: Tom Chaplin.

The writing by Cathy Farmer and Tamiko Dooley is what truly distinguishes the show. The lyrics, in particular, are astonishingly tight; every line is doing narrative work, developing character or pushing the story forward. They have taken a leaf out of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s book, ensuring there’s precision and intentionality in every word. 

Dooley’s score, performed here with just a single piano, is deceptively rich. There’s a muscularity to the composition that suggests a much larger sound world waiting to be unlocked. Even in this stripped-back form, the music drives the storytelling rather than decorating it. I can’t wait to hear the developments of the score with more instrumentation. I can already imagine the contemporary production, driven by The System, colliding with the 19th-century instrumentation of the characters to create a unique and unmistakable sound that reinforces the show’s collision between past and present. 

At the heart of the production is Meg Abbott’s Ada Lovelace, a performance that anchors the entire piece. Abbott resists every temptation to turn Lovelace into a historical stereotype. Instead, she gives us someone grounded, intelligent, and emotionally specific. Her Ada isn’t “the woman in computing”; she’s a person who wants to return to her own time, to finish her work. During the final scene, Lovelace delivers the line, “History isn’t fact, it’s an editorial decision,” and this simple piece of dialogue has stuck with me from the moment I heard it. 

Meg Abbott as Ada Lovelace. Photo Credit: Tom Chaplin

Ashleigh Cassidy’s Ethel Smyth provides the show’s comic and emotional volatility. Cassidy is gloriously unfiltered. Her energy makes Smyth feel like a force of nature, and her performance avoids the trap of turning activism into seriousness. Instead, she’s vibrant, contradictory, and unapologetically herself. The bubbling sapphic tension between Smyth and Pankhurst is one of the evening’s most interesting dramatic choices, culminating in an incredible duet, “Do I Dare?” That embraces disagreement as a form of connection — that was the standout song for me. 

Aishling Jones’ Pankhurst is the most recognisable figure. The performance is commanding and vocally assured, but the character occasionally leans into familiar rhetoric. There are moments where the writing pushes her towards speechifying, and while that suits the historical figure, it risks reducing her to the very simplification the show is critiquing. It’s the one area where the production could dig deeper.

Charlie Renwick’s Callum is a clever subversion of expectation. Rather than presenting an alpha-tech villain plucked from the manosphere, Renwick plays him as weak, needy, and faintly ridiculous. His desperation for daddy’s approval and mummy’s love undermines his authority from the outset. One could argue that making Callum less of a genuine threat lowers the stakes of the show, but the trade-off works firmly in its favour. Rather than becoming a man-hating feminist piece, Flyology becomes a far more unifying experience, one that focuses on elevating these historical women to the heights they deserve, rather than dragging men down to get them there. It keeps the show’s message sharp and purposeful, allowing it to celebrate women’s voices without muddying that intention with bitterness.

Aishling Jones (Pankhurst), Ashleigh Cassidy (Smyth), Charlie Renwick (Callum) and Meg Abbott (Lovelace). Photo Credit: Tom Chaplin.

One area where the production shows its fringe limitations is in how it presents the AI itself. Voiced by Charlotte Webb, the AI is a strong conceptual presence but lacks a physical or visual identity. Extended voiceover sections slow the pacing, particularly when there’s nothing onstage for the audience to engage with. The use of lighting helps, but in a larger production, this element would need to evolve, either through embodiment or a more concise script.

In a small space with a small cast, Grace Browning’s choreography feels purposeful rather than decorative. There’s a striking sense of unity among the three women, evoking the Weird Sisters but reframed through solidarity rather than mysticism. It’s a reminder that effective physical storytelling just needs intention.

This is fringe theatre doing exactly what it should. Flyology doesn’t just revisit history, it rewrites it in real time, reminding us that the past isn’t fixed, it’s chosen. This is a show with an exciting, bright future ahead.  And if this production has anything to say about it, the story is far from finished… It’s just beginning to take flight.