Balloon Girl review – tech tycoon swirls with tragic teen parachutist in a crackling, time-travelling climate romp

This show takes local history as its starting point, that of a 19th-century balloonist’s assistant who performed a parachute stunt in the skies above Cardiff. It throws in a current-day tech billionaire, the space race, a time-travelling hot-air balloon, and – for good measure? – a lifesize seagull that speaks.

Surprisingly, given the complications of writer-director Hannah McPake’s high-wire drama, it lifts off, swirling through the clouds on its air-bound set, crackling with humour and effervescent imagination along with a keen sense of unwritten history, to become a complete blast.

Louisa Maud Evans was the real-life 14-year-old girl from Bristol who was enlisted to perform a parachute jump from a hot-air balloon during the Fine Art, Industrial and Maritime Exhibition of 1896. She had little experience of parachuting and she perished in the Bristol Channel after an unfavourable wind cast her out to sea.

Louisa appears in different guises in McPake’s story, which begins with Carol Gaudron (Elin Phillips), a celebrity tech billionaire and descendant of Auguste Eugene Gaudron (Keiron Self), the balloonist who enlisted Louisa for the ill-fated stunt. The opening scene is a reality quizshow in which a guileless young woman from Bristol wins a televised rocket trip to Mars. “Let’s get humanity off this planet and into the stars,” declares Carol, who has all the integrity of a tech visionary turned rank capitalist. It’s a very nifty way to join up the 19th-century endeavour to conquer the skies and perform public displays of showmanship with modern-day tech bro ambitions in the space race.

The story swivels from satire (on everything from reality TV to AI and journalism) to a picaresque journey of time travel for Carol, with a kooky young navigator, Louisa (Mari Fflur) and the talking seagull (Oliver Wood). There are shades of A Christmas Carol – in space – as this trio travels redemptively to the past and future before returning Carol, transformed, to her present.

There is so much plot, such rich imagination and great zinging lines alongside a serious underlying message about climate and planetary resource. It occasionally comes too thick and fast, leaving you behind, but it is fun even in its confusions.

Hayley Grindle’s set switches between gorgeous small-scale puppetry and grand hot-air balloon imagery. McPake has created several shows for this theatre but this surely has to be one of her best. An airborne triumph.