WAVES, a solo drama by Alice Mary Cooper, is a fascinating piece of biographical theatre. Performed to critical acclaim before the pandemic, it is now being revived for a Scottish tour.

The piece tells the story of Elizabeth Moncello, one of the most accomplished Australian swimmers of the 20th century and unofficial inventor of the butterfly stroke. Her biography is constructed by an unnamed narrator, a young, Australian woman who first encountered Elizabeth, then aged 98, when she was resident in an Edinburgh hospice.

Elizabeth’s recent death has prompted the younger woman (who is played by Cooper) to tell her compatriot’s remarkable story. Raised on the tiny Gabo Island, which is 600-metres from the coast of the Australian state of Victoria, Elizabeth became an extremely proficient swimmer as a consequence of a series of heart-breaking, painful and triumphant experiences.

Her remarkable proficiency eventually brought Elizabeth into the orbit of Fanny Durack, the legendary Australian swimmer and, by then (in the mid-1930s), chief of the Australian women’s Olympic swimming team. It would be criminal to divulge more specific details of the story, so fascinating are both the tale and the telling.

Suffice it to say that Cooper (who is splitting performing duties with her colleague Kerry Cleland on this tour) conveys the story with an enthralling skill in both language and physical performance. Directed by the ever-impressive Gill Robertson (artistic director of leading children’s theatre company Catherine Wheels), the piece is touring to, not only a number of Scotland’s theatres, but also a series of primary schools and care homes.

Cooper plays on a bare stage, assisted by nothing more than a chair, a table and a few, carefully selected props. In doing so, she succeeds beautifully in evoking, by turns, the swimming pool of a modern day Scottish hospice, the fear of the sea of Elizabeth and her non-swimming family, and the terrible anguish of the life-changing event that turned the young Elizabeth towards her illustrious swimming career.

The performer is a wonderfully accomplished and thoroughly engaging storyteller and actor. Segueing between the role of the narrator and the character of Elizabeth herself, Cooper also takes a series of other, brief roles in her stride; these range from Elizabeth’s parents, to a dismayed doctor and the great Fanny Durack. Her anthropomorphic impressions of fish and “water kangaroos” (that’s dolphins to you and me) are delightful in their physical comedy.

INTRIGUINGLY, Cooper’s storytelling is focused so firmly upon Elizabeth, her thoughts, feelings and the details of her biography, that it all but obliterates the world beyond. This is particularly noticeable in the passage concerning the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, which manages to say nothing at all about the fact that they were played under the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler.

This is, no doubt, a deliberate choice. Cooper is much too skilled a storyteller for it to be an oversight.

Indeed, the piece as a whole poses some fascinating questions about truth and how we construct stories. Indeed, the writer and performer must be acutely aware of how the addition or subtraction of a single word can alter meaning; remove the word “Mary” from her name, and she would struggle to escape the monicker of the male, American rock star Alice Cooper.

Ultimately, despite being a charming, gentle and, only occasionally, disquieting work of theatre, Waves is brilliantly disruptive of the idea of a definitive separation of fact from fiction.

It also raises powerful questions about women’s history, the moments in which women are erased and the reasons why, so often, they are absent.

Touring until October 22. For details, visit: independentartsprojects.com