If you’ve heard Elf Lyons’ name on the comedy scene before, chances are it’s been in a distinctly avian context. The Gaulier-trained performer-comic’s critically acclaimed Bird Trilogy (Swan, Chiffchaff and Raven) has earned Lyons a cult status on the Fringe circuit as a proud and deliberate odd duck, weaving together traditional clowning techniques, dramaturgy and incisive writing to deliver something that flutters with whimsy, but still has a sting in its peck.

Horses, Lyons’ move to the equine family, carries a few similarities to her previous outings. There’s a delightful lean towards surrealism and abstraction; she warns us to beware the 'venomous kick' of our host, ‘Treacle’ (Lyons herself in crochet horse ears). There’s an emphasis on drawing the audience into the conceit; I was swiftly dispatched by my partner emerging from Lyons’ ‘Trojan Horse’ to murder the audience of ‘Greek soldiers’, a relationship milestone I did not see coming. And there’s a thread of pathos that weaves its way through proceedings as tightly structured as a dressage horses’ braid. Lyons, as ever, sells it with rangy and rubbery physicality, and her vocal mannerisms and facial expressions rival Catherine O’Hara in their calculated lilts and distortions.

But where a swan or a raven carry quite specific cultural associations from which Lyons can draw, the horse has a unique sort of versatility in our popular consciousness that gives her the chance to be more elastic in her play. It’s traditionally been both a mark of the landed gentry and of the working class. It's highly masculinised and militaristic - Lyons touches on the equine casualties and trauma of both World Wars, as well as the depressing fact that there are significantly more statues of horses in the UK than there are of named women. Yet it's also affiliated with the ‘girly’ or childlike - look to the cultural impact of Black Beauty, My Little Pony or the archetype of the ‘horse girl’.

The horse is seen at once as both mature and juvenile, and it’s that line Lyons seeks to tread - well, trot. This is done to great comic effect in the Oliver Postgate-esque hellscape of Filly Fat Farm, featuring Chubby, a pony with murderous intent, and plucky upstart Toffee, whose ultimate fate is the sweetest kind of treacle-dark comedy. But the heart of this hour is the lip synced vignettes Lyons weaves through the silliness, vox pop interviews with her family as they discuss her childhood ‘playing horses’ in the back garden with her siblings, a respite for a misfit young Elf struggling to make friends. There’s a little heartbreak in her sister’s admission to their mother that she ‘can’t be a horse anymore’, a putting away of childish things that hits as hard and as tragic as Toffee’s unceremonious demise.