Flyology – Union Theatre

Picture: Tom Chaplin

Flyology continues at the Union Theatre, London until 8 May 2026.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

You can’t move for people talking about AI at the moment. From worries about people struggling with their mental health relying too much on sycophantic chatbots which encourage self-harm, to Elon Musk’s Grok digitally altering pictures of women and children to make them more sexual, to the US Pentagon declaring Anthropic a risk to national security, after the company worried that its tools might be used for mass surveillance and automated warfare.

Things in the space are progressing so quickly that Tamiko Dooley and Cathy Farmer’s musical, which concerns a virtual reality environment overseen by a sentient AI, already risks falling behind. Even the concept of a VR world being the focus of a venture capital pitch – in the Union Theatre, the audience are assumed to be potential investors for the product being pitched by tech wunderkind Callum (Charlie Renwick) – already feels out of date.

That’s the risk with anything that deals with near-future science fiction, of course. Musicals take longer to fully develop than many other types of stage performance, so that makes shows like Flyology especially vulnerable to being taken over by events.

Callum’s opening spiel betrays him as someone who is, to be kind, not a fan of women. His vision of his VR world is something that is “unhindered” by emotion, woeness or – shudder – women. So when his world is “infected” by three women from history, he considers it to be a bug that he is determined to eradicate.

The women concerned are not unknown, although they each have stories that have at one time or another been quelled or subsumed into patriarchal views of history. Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst (Aishling Jones) and composer Ethel Smyth (Ashleigh Cassidy) were contemporaries of one another, and Pankhurst was one of Smyth’s many lovers. They are joined by Meg Abbott’s Victorian mathematical and programming pioneer Ada Lovelace, who quickly comes to appreciate the machine they are trapped in.

Quite why these three women have appeared is a question that is largely ignored, as is what they actually are – if this is a digital world, then they too must be digital copies. And if that’s the case, what exactly are the stakes? The three women, however, are still concerned about returning to their own times. Ada, in particular, is desperate to return to her beloved mentor Charles Babbage, prompting scorn from the others over how beholden she is to a man.

While it often feels like Farmer’s book is structurally wavering, there’s a lot more confidence in the songs. Dooley’s music has a pleasant timelessness to it, rooted in romanticism. Dooley and Farmer’s lyrics are in the same mould, and gel with the music beautifully – every syllable gains just the right emphasis through the change in melodic line in ways that many modern musical writers struggle with.

In some ways, it is a shame that all three women receive similar melodic treatment, though. While the musical style fits with Abbott’s interpretation of Ada, making her feel like the standout star of the show, it is particularly noticeable that Ethel talks about her own compositions as being musically distinctive, only for her songs to be anything but.

Cassidy has a lot of fun, though, with Ethel’s forthright directness, especially when taunting her ex Emmeline. That does make Jones’ suffragette seem rather less strident and self-confident than she perhaps might. Their story also feels slightly detached from the rest of the plot, seeming to spend half the play roaming corridors while Ada wrestles with the meatier themes of the play.

And unfortunately, despite some tremendous solos by Abbott, those themes do not feel particularly compelling. That’s not helped by the personality given to Renwick to play, forcing Callum to be an immature brat who behaves like a bratty teenager. One confrontation with Ada shows a more conniving, mature side to the character that, if witnessed throughout, would make him a much more powerful antagonist.

Together with a pre-curtain reveal by the AI voice that, far from adding an anticipated final twist, merely reduces further the already low stakes of what has gone before, there is a sense that while the intention behind the musical is genuine and sound, the whole framing device of a world where nothing is real does little to accentuate the play’s premise.

What we conceive of as history is a selective version of what has been allowed to be remembered by those writing it. The roles of women, of LGBTQ+ folk, and of other minorities in our collective history have always been overlooked. Even though previously ignored figures are starting to creep back into our historical narrative, it is a perpetual battle to reappraise the past to rectify previous omissions.

With AI tools becoming ever more prevalent, their narrative interpretations are going to become the gatekeepers to history that the pale, male and stale academics once were. Flyology doesn’t quite offer a remedy to that, but it does remind us to keep pushing, so that artificial intelligence does not make the same patriarchal mistakes as our own society has done.

Scott Matthewman