‘Arthur Cravan: poet and boxer, captain of industry, sailor of the Pacific, muleteer, orange-picker in California, hotel thief, snake charmer, grandson of the Queen’s chancellor, nephew of Oscar Wilde, lumberjack in the great forests, chauffeur in Berlin, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s great nephew’…and so the list goes on.

He is best known as a writer and weaver of tales, which gives the performer of this piece the opportunity to take as many liberties with fact and fiction as they like. To play with form, to play with the audience and to effect an act transubstantiation, as actor becomes subject.

Sandy Grierson and co-creator Lorne Campbell have taken the play through many stages of development to reach its current state of text, movement and meta-theatrical construct. The audience is in on it from the start; there is no pretence or over-cleverness. If you are told at the beginning that Sandy (playing Sandy) met his great grandfather Arthur Cravan in a drum and bass club in Lisbon in 2010 – and that Arthur was born aged 22 – you can relax and enjoy the ride to come.

Highly enjoyable it is too. Our programmes become paper hats and several of us are given roles to play, or asked questions, and memorably, brought on stage to box (in my case Tom Morris who did sterling work with the fists). Sandy is magnificent and mercurial given the complexities and conceits of the text and the physicality of the role. There is a delightful looseness of limb about him and he works the stage like a prize-fighter, confident in control of a small range of props and the audience.

The story moves through various episodes in Cravan’s life, introducing a range of characters: Marcel Duchamp, Trotsky, Apollinaire and Mina Loy, the love of his life. Audience members are allotted these names but other than Mina are not invited to engage much more. The piece ends beautifully as we pass a paper boat around the auditorium, waving goodbye to Mina on the coast. We are asked to consider our options – to leave forever or return to port and Mina. Sandy tells us: ‘Know that dreaming you are here, know that dreaming you are there, is exactly the same. Know that a slight imaginary choice is the only difference and that for good or bad you are making it.’ And we still have our boats, if we should ever need to use them. It’s a great metaphor for what theatre can do, how it can affect change and take you places whilst being aware of the actor on the stage and our complicity and involvement in its making.