Ripon Theatre Festival continues to unearth stories that deserve a wider audience, and Down to Chance is one of its finest discoveries yet. The action takes place on 27 March 1964 in Alaska, Good Friday, as broadcast journalist Genie Chance (Ellie Jay Cooper) is out driving with her son when an earthquake of magnitude 9.2 strikes North America — the most powerful ever recorded on the continent and the second largest anywhere in the world. She calls it in, and what follows is a masterclass in how a single voice on the radio can hold a fractured city together.

Dom (Robert Merriam) plays a wonderful, eclectic set of characters opposite her, switching with only the addition of a hat, a scarf or a jacket – the seamless transitions between Mrs Ambrose, General Whitaker and a gloriously loquacious radio volunteer are among the production's real pleasures. The synchronicity between the two actors is superbly judged, and the pace never slackens: this is lively, energetic theatre that captures with real authenticity the workings of a newsroom, complete with its political power play and its ambitious journalists jostling to rise to the top.

What gives the play its rhythmic energy is the fact that it is all true. Genie Chance was a real broadcaster, Walt was a real character, and — as the cast explained afterwards — the production itself was born out of lockdown, with some lines drawn directly from the historical record. Information has consequences; we know that now, but the situation was long before social media and rolling news, and there is a great deal here that still rings true today.

Radio remains, as the rise of podcasts demonstrates, a profoundly human form of communication. As a broadcaster on BBC Radio Essex myself, I was reminded of Terry Wogan's dictum, delivered in countless interviews down the years, to talk to your mother — this was not quite that, amid the chaos and the panic, but the instinct behind it is the same.

Genie is a strong woman throughout, torn between the demands of the job and a husband, Winston, who moved the family up from Texas five years earlier and wants her to give it up. The general, initially irritated by her, warms to her by degrees, not least when she has to decide whether to broadcast news of a possible second earthquake – she judges, against his wishes, that telling listeners would cause more panic than it would prevent.

Some of the evening's best comedy comes once Genie is out at the Anchorage Public Safety Building, sending in live copy, while Dom is left holding the studio with his choir friend Kathleen. The pair keep listeners alert and tuned in through a run of increasingly hopeless games – charades; a round of guess-the-object as things are dropped on the studio floor (a pencil, since you ask); and a quiz asking listeners to name Alaska's state flower. The play never actually reveals the answer, which sent me to Google afterwards: it is the Alpine forget-me-not.

The sound and lighting design is superb throughout, and the production is genuinely compelling theatre — thought-provoking, funny, and built on a script that handles its history with real care. If there is one thing that could have strengthened it further, it would be at the close: as the theatre descends into darkness and Genie is still talking on the radio, the moment could have merged into the real archive commentary, perhaps with a clip or a static presentation of what happened next. Anyone wanting the full story needs only to look Genie Chance up on YouTube; what she did next, broadcasting to help coordinate the rescue effort, is public service broadcasting at its very best, and the play's final scene has earned the right to reach for it.

That small reservation aside, Down to Chance is precisely the kind of discovery the Ripon Theatre Festival exists to make, and this year's programme continues to prove what a genuinely wonderful festival it has become.