Galwad: A Story From Our Future, review: a climate change drama that felt like a lecture by a teenage activist

Clocking in at four-and-a-half hours, multimedia climate emergency drama Galwad: A Story From Our Future (Sky Arts) rumbled across the screen with hurricane-like gusto. This was epic storytelling by north Wales/Wirral production company Mad as Birds, blending real-time theatre, impressionistic dance and a time-travel plot straight out of Doctor Who.

But if the execution was impressive, culminating in a surreal rave in the hills above the industrial town of Blaenau Ffestiniog, in Gwynedd, the production was undermined by a preachy and sentimental storyline. It starred Aisha-May Hunte as Efa, a 16-year-old from Merthyr Tydfil who swapped personalities with her 46-year-old self (Alexandria Riley) after a crack in time allowed the latter to beam in from climate-ravaged 2052 to warn us about the evils of global warming.

Alas, her injunctions against climate change had all the profundity of an Extinction Rebellion TikTok video. They were also received by the inhabitants of 2022 as if ecological catastrophe was a new and alarming prospect when climate anxiety is already part of the temperature of our everyday lives. Tell us something we don’t know.

The thinness of the messaging became clear during a live segment towards the end of the broadcast, in which Efa stood on a sort-of Burning Man rave-stage in Blaenau Ffestiniog and delivered an environmental homily. “Instead of living at the end of everything, we could be living at the beginning of something,” she said, sounding like a teenage activist on Facebook.

Galwad – Welsh for “calling” – was also confusing. Much of the story had already been told over the preceding six days via a patchwork of short films, blog posts and messages on social media. These snippets were reproduced across the four-and-a-half hours, but proved difficult to follow. On top of this, the identities of other characters from the future who, like 46-year-old Efa, were phoning the past to warn us about the impending climate devastation and the arrival to Wales of thousands of displaced peoples, remained opaque for too long.

It was only after the resolution of “present day” Efa’s adventures that director Claire Doherty chose to explain their backstories. The cathartic live segment, in which she walked into the light and re-connected with her 16-year-old soul, was followed by an anti-climactic 60-minute film set in 2052. We tracked 46-year-old Efa, who had now become a receptacle of her 16-year-old mind.

It was here, too, that we caught up with those messengers from the future. Alas, the dialogue boiled down to different ways of declaring “climate change bad”. Moreover, due to budget constraints, dystopian future-Swansea was essentially a dead-ringer for the perfectly pleasant pre-apocalyptic 2022 version, apart from the fact that part of the city had flooded.

There were parallels with interactive theatre company Punchdrunk’s live, 12-hour episode of The Third Day from two years ago, in which Jude Law undertook a sort of pagan Stations of the Cross. The pitch of that broadcast was simple: park yourself on the couch and watch a Hollywood star stumble about in the mud for an afternoon.

Galwad had bitten off a lot more. It was a warning about climate change, a meditation on ageing and an exploration of Welsh identity, these many strands woven together in a busy tangle.

There was also a secondary story in which a grieving widower (Nitin Ganatra) used the time portal to call his late wife in 2022. The scene in which they finally connected was well acted, but this reminder that we should cherish our loved ones felt even more simplistic than the plea to be better shepherds of our environment.

In the final analysis, Galwad was beautiful, ardent and very, very long – but had precious little to say.