Review: FLYOLOGY at the Union Theatre

Date: 06/05/26

Stars: 3

Before Tamiko Dooley’s Flyology even officially starts, Charlie Renwick’s Callum is already wandering around the stage chatting to the audience, explaining who he is and why we’re all there, and it immediately gives the whole thing a slightly chaotic energy. We’re investors, apparently, gathered to witness the future of technology, a system designed to strip away emotion completely and leave behind a world run only on logic. No mess, no feelings, and, notably, no women.

Which tells you quite a lot about the show very quickly.

The premise itself is both very simple and strangely difficult to explain at the same time. Basically, Callum has created some kind of system, app, simulation, VR experience (I’m still not entirely sure what it physically is), but there’s been a glitch. Somehow, Ada Lovelace (Meg Abbott), Emmeline Pankhurst (Aishling Jones), and Ethel Smyth (Ashleigh Cassidy) have ended up inside it, causing chaos purely through being emotional, unpredictable human beings – female human beings, specifically. That’s the easy part to follow. The harder part is understanding where any of this is actually happening, how the system works, what the rules are, and why certain things suddenly matter when they do. At a certain point, it becomes easier just to go with it rather than pull at the threads too hard, because once you start questioning the logic, quite a lot unravels.

And maybe that’s intentional because the whole musical is a bit mixed up. It starts firmly as a comedy, and there are funny moments running all the way through it, but then suddenly it changes into something bigger and more dramatic, then sad, then rebellious, then strangely heartfelt, and by the end it veers almost fully into horror and existential dread. It’s a huge tonal swing, and I’m not convinced it fully works, especially because the final darker turn feels like it belongs to a different show entirely. There’s a suggestion that the AI side of things is actually the bigger threat underneath everything, but it arrives so late that it feels less like a revelation and more like an afterthought.

Which is a shame, because the material around the three women is probably the strongest thing here, and there’s more than enough in their stories already without needing to add quite so many extra layers on top.

The relationship subplot between Ethel Smyth and Emmeline Pankhurst is probably the clearest example of that. It arrives quite suddenly, doesn’t really go anywhere, and then apparently becomes hugely important right at the end when their kiss somehow helps break the simulation or stop the glitch or whatever exactly is happening by that point. I think the idea is that emotion itself becomes the thing the system can’t process, but the rules are so vague by then that it’s hard to know. Any strong emotional moment probably could have achieved the same thing, which makes it feel slightly random.

That becomes the recurring issue throughout; there are genuinely interesting ideas everywhere, but too many of them at once. The story of the historical women alone could have carried a whole musical. The AI takeover angle could probably be its own separate piece entirely. And then there’s also a possible love story in there, alongside questions about identity, logic, emotion, progress, history, and who gets remembered. It’s a lot for seventy minutes.

Performance-wise though, everyone throws themselves into it completely, which helps enormously. Charlie Renwick’s Callum is intentionally a bit too much at times, all exaggerated confidence and tech-bro energy, but it fits the role even if it occasionally tips over the top. The women are all engaging in very different ways, and you keep wanting the show to slow down and let them exist as people rather than constantly pushing the plot and exposition forward.

And that’s probably where I am with it overall. There’s clearly imagination here, and ambition, and moments where it really clicks into something clever and funny and slightly unhinged, but it’s trying to do too many things at once, and by the end I wasn’t entirely sure what it actually wanted to say.

Still, it’s never boring, which counts for quite a lot these days.

Flyology plays at the Union Theatre until 8th May 2026, and tickets are available here: https://uniontheatre.biz/show/flyology/