Banksy: The Room in the Elephant

In 2011, the artist Banksy scrawled "this looks a bit like an Elephant" onto a water tank in Los Angeles. As the water tank rocketed in value, Tachowa Covington, the homeless man for whom the tank had been home for years, was evicted. "You don't want to know about me; y'all want to know about Banksy," Covington realises. But, like graffiti, the bum's story is scrawled across the front of our expectations. It's lurid, confrontational and utterly revealing about the nature of art.

There are two revelations here: the first is that what could be turgid and inward looking bumph on artistic values patently isn't that. It's a moving drama about a victim of art who then becomes the artist, manipulating our emotions, our sympathies and our sense of what the hell is even real or not.

The second is a simply stunning performance from Gary Beadle – an actor familiar to many as Paul Trueman in Eastenders. Without wishing to do a disservice to the long-running soap this, surely, provides a more suitable outlet for an actor of such considerable abilities. That this piece does not implode under a weight of looping, self-referential artistic spraff is in no small part due to Beadle's skill in keeping all the plates spinning, sculpting and sustaining a real character at the centre of a philosophical debate on the utility or instrumentality of art. In these hands, Tachowa Covington is much more than a muse or a metaphor. He is the victim of a pleasure industry, as well as one of its most affecting flowerings.