What happens when a tech bro builds a predictive AI system to stabilise the next generation, but three dead women from history with serious unfinished business infiltrate it? Ticket Link: https://uniontheatre.biz/show/flyology/
FLYOLOGY drops Ada Lovelace, Emmeline Pankhurst and Ethel Smyth into a rogue AI simulation; what excited you about bringing these formidable figures to life through music?
What excited us most was the contradiction at the heart of each of them: women who were ferociously, visibly themselves in eras that demanded their silence. Ada reduced to a footnote in someone else’s invention. Ethel conducting with a toothbrush from a prison cell. Emmeline building a movement that kept being dismantled. When you put that kind of compressed history into a rogue simulation, music becomes the thing that lets them finally say what they weren’t allowed to say. And with Ethel being a composer herself, there was something almost mischievous about giving her songs, as if we were returning something that had always belonged to her.
The show blends sci-fi glitch with feminist riot; how did you write songs that feel as disruptive and unapologetic as the story itself?
I tried to let the songs misbehave in the same way the women do. They shift register without warning: tender then furious, funny then devastating. The songs I write come quickly and have an emotional truth to them as they’re always about a raw or difficult moment that needs processing for me personally through songwriting. I refuse to turn away or dial down the emotion and lean into that feeling as I write – which is a form of disruptive behaviour as songwriters: to tell our story honestly through song. This, in turn, allows the character to be truthful.
At its core FLYOLOGY asks who gets erased when efficiency becomes the goal; what conversations about tech and power were you hoping to spark?
The conversation we kept returning to was: Who defines efficiency? Because the answer is always the person with the power to set the parameters. Callum, our EdTech bro, isn’t cartoonishly evil. He genuinely believes in optimisation. That’s what makes him dangerous. The women aren’t erased because he hates them; they’re erased because the things that make them extraordinary, their inconvenience, their insistence, their love, don’t fit the model. We wanted audiences to sit with that discomfort and recognise it. Not just in AI, but in every institution that has ever decided that certain kinds of humanity are inefficiencies to be processed out.
With fourth-wall breaks and music that refuses to behave, how did you shape a sound world that matches the show’s chaos?
The fourth-wall breaks started in the script and infected the music, which is exactly what we wanted. There are moments where the score acknowledges the audience the same way the characters do; a sudden shift in texture that says “yes, we know you’re there.” Each character adds her own texture to the sound world, and the ensemble numbers have unapologetic quodlibet sections where voices intentionally clash to show that the riot has arrived. The chaos isn’t decorative. We wanted a sound world where you could never quite settle, because these women never could.
After sold-out runs and workshops, how has FLYOLOGY evolved as audiences have started to encounter it?
The workshops taught us what audiences needed more of and less of, and almost universally, it was more jeopardy. The stakes needed to feel real. Early on, the women’s intelligence protected them too quickly, and audiences wanted to feel genuinely frightened for them. That note changed the second act significantly. Over the last year, we’ve been inspired by other shows we’ve seen – Ballad Lines, Mincemeat, Cable Street, Dear England, as a few examples – brilliant shows make us write better by helping us focus on those moments that make the story sing. The longer we write together and become immersed in the world of FLYOLOGY, the more distinct our writing becomes and is focused on storytelling. Audiences have made FLYOLOGY funnier and darker in equal measure, which feels like exactly the right direction.
The show suggests the qualities systems try to tidy away might actually hold everything together; how did that idea shape the score?
The score is heavy on human connection – things which the system, which AI cannot recognise. It can describe it, regurgitate every article written about it from the internet, but it cannot fundamentally understand love on a human level. So with the score, the songs hold the story together with emotion, taking the words that are spoken onto a different plane. It is these moments where characters break into song that are crucial to the show, and to the idea that emotion, even if we try to erase it, is what fundamentally holds us all together.