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.
