In comedy terms, Elf Lyons has always been less of a thoroughbred, more of a breed apart – never more so than with Horses, which considers the world, and her personal history, through an equine lens. Part-clown, part-mime and part- (as ever with Lyons, and more pointedly here) overgrown child at play, the show introduces us to a stable’s worth of horses through history, animated by a comic really putting her long limbs, big eyes and animal mimicry skills through their paces.
So far, so diverting – but Lyons undergirds the bestial character-comedy with lip-synced interviews with her family, recalling the imaginative childhood landscapes of Elf and her siblings, in which horses played a prominent role.
It starts with a foal being born, a dumbshow that captivatingly honours Lyons’ earlier promise to be “NOT FUNNY!” Horses is at its best when it complicates quirky with these richer colours – strikingly so late on, when a likable young racer is injured in the Grand National, with terminal consequences. An earlier scene, reviving the Greeks’ attack on Troy with audience assistance, is just horsing around. Pegasus and his mum, Medusa, visiting a shoe shop is a stronger sequence, giving Lyons lots, and lots that’s fun, to play with. Sometimes eccentric, or cute, deputises for funny. Slowly, things grow darker, as we meet an ex-war horse put out to pasture and a pony casting off its child-carrying burden.
And so an animal rights agenda asserts itself, but with a playful touch, and only as an aside to Lyons’ main concern. Which is with the child’s imagination: why we set it aside as adults, whether we (specifically, her brother and sister) might ever get back to it. She treads a fine line here, an insistently whimsical comic inviting us all to reconnect with our inner child. You might feel you’ve been fed one too many sugar lumps. But by the final furlong, I was won over by Lyons’ defiance of cynicism, by what feels like the honesty of her engagement with questions that strike to the heart of her professional (and personal) identity. On the fringe racecard, this is a horse worth backing.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 26 August
