A homeless person in Los Angeles made homeless by an anonymous street artist from Bristol.

It’s truth stranger than fiction, but then in a new play written by Tom Wainwright and previewed this weekend at the Tobacco Factory and The Station before heading to the Edinburgh Festival, truth and fiction are interchangeable.

In Banksy: The Room in the Elephant we meet Tachowa Covington, who lived inside an old water tank that looked rather like an elephant:

Then Banksy came along when in town for the Oscars, wrote “This looks a bit like an elephant” on the tank and Covington was evicted once his home for more than seven years had become a valuable work of art.

Gary Beadle was the one actor on stage at The Station last night, and he was superb.

With an unkempt beard, dressed in shorts and a vest top, and pushing a shopping trolley with a treasure trove of paraphernalia, he became a man almost as mysterious and mischievous as our street art friend.

Director Emma Callander allows the former water tank resident to be portrayed as confident yet vulnerable, his cocky swagger masking mysterious inner demons and an unknown past.

There were even real tears from Beadle, all soundtracked by the Bristol sound of Massive Attack, Portishead, Tricky and Roni Size.

Then when the real Covington was introduced to us after the show via Skype, it was clear that Beadle had picked up some of his ticks, but was thankfully slightly more intelligible – although that could have just been the internet link-up from America.

Wainwright gave Covington a video camera to record his life in preparation for this play we were watching and it is undoubtedly gold-plated source material.

When Hal Samples, a filmmaker from Dallas who made a documentary, Something From Nothing, about Techowa was introduced after the performance, I was half-expecting the next person to stand up and talk to be Banksy himself.

It’s a shame that the audiences in Edinburgh will not have the luxury of seeing the documentary and then talking to Techowa, who we learnt is now living in a tent in the woods overlooking where the location of the water tank, the current whereabouts of which is a mystery.

Banksy: The Room in the Elephant is bold and brassy, with witty writing and a scintillating central performance, yet it leaves tantalising questions unanswered.