The first of two A Play, A Pie, and A Pint co-productions with Bristol Tobacco Factory, Tom Wainwright's solo piece stars Gary Beadle.
It focuses on real events last year, when elusive British street artist Banksy turned a derelict water tank next to the Pacific Coast Highway into a much talked about objet d'art by stencilling the words: "THIS LOOKS A BIT LIKE AN ELEPHANT" on it. The elephant, ("in the room"), motif had previously been used metaphorically by Banksy to highlight poverty.
Banksy's intent was turned on its head when an opportunistic land grab saw the tank removed, with the result that a local vagrant who had been living there for a number of years was made homeless.
It's an intriguing, and ironic story: one full of contemporary resonance about greed, poverty, homelessness and art. Wainwright could easily have fashioned into a straight piece of docu-realism, but he attempts something trickier and more ambitious here in his sharply written and empathetic drama.
Finding himself caught up in a world where his life has become not only a plunderable "art" by-product for Banksy, but also by playwright Wainwright himself, Beadle's "Tinseltown tramp" (here renamed Titus Coventry), tries to set the story straight by breaking into his old "home" to post a YouTube response to events that have overtaken him, in order to place his humanity centre stage (no matter how humdrum and appalling his "story" may be).
His only companion a toy rat named B (no prizes for deconstructing that piece of Banksyism), Beadle turns in a warm, winning performance in what is a stimulating, multi-layered, thought-provoking, Russian doll of a play.
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