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For a happy handful of years in the noughties, around the time she made her TV name on Flight of the Conchords’ sitcom, Kristen Schaal was a fringe fixture, award-nominated in 2008 for her two-hander with Kurt Braunohler, Double Down Hearts. If those shows found Schaal kooking on gas, about as wilfully dotty and insubstantial as you’d ever wish comedy to be, the intervening two decades seem to have changed her not a jot.
The Legend of Crystal Shell, her two-hander with John Roberts, casts the comic actor as a half-woman, half-horse, overcoming a lifetime of shame to deliver a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake for tonight’s audience. It plays as if written by a primary schoolchild high on pick’n’mix, and is endearing and nonplussing in equal measure.
It begins with Schaal confined to a cardboard refrigerator-cum-horsebox, shyly announcing herself to the crowd. She emerges, to recount her origin story, as the progeny of her mum’s unlikely tryst with a stallion called Shimmer. We meet her friend Arnold the (suspiciously dormant) mouse. She reads non sequitur poems and tries to catch fairies in a net.
A flightier confection it would be hard to imagine, and my patience was fraying with it until – at the blast of a trumpet – Crystal’s long-lost dad makes an appearance. That multiplies the cast, at least, if not the significance, as this wannabe unicorn starts singing about the malfunctioning healing powers of his “teeny tiny horn”.
So what does all this horsing about amount to? They’re both compelling performers: Schaal the otherworldly womanchild, Roberts her Fonz-alike father. There’s something almost audacious in the randomness of the play’s narrative development, as if they’d set themselves the challenge of accepting every first idea, however arbitrarily it advances the plot. There are hints too, if tenuous, that Crystal’s late blooming may be a metaphor for the menopause. If so, it sheds little light, but plenty of sparkle, as Schaal’s alter ego grows her own twinkling uni-horn and puts a life of meekness behind her. There’s nothing meek about Schaal’s comedy, whose take-it-as-you-find-it idiosyncracy is easy to admire and, usually, to indulge.
