Blue Love

Shaun Parker and Jo Stone are superb artists, with great comic timing, wonderful dance skills and a real talent for satire.

Conversely, their alter egos, Glenn and Rhonda Flune are none of those things, and get by on amateur chutzpah, and a total unawareness of their own mediocrity. The delicate balance of brilliance masquerading as banality is at the heart of the cleverly conceived Blue Love. It’s important for an audience to understand that from the outset, and understand the characters, or the first few minutes might lead to confusion, and an underestimation of just how smart and innovative this show is.

Imagine, as the audience, that you’re invited to the living room of Glenn and Rhonda for a soiree of home movies…ever so slightly naughty….about love; or at least love as Glenn and Rhonda see it.

Barely managing their pretensions, the couple dispense tubs of pop corn and cold tinnies of Fourex, while they pontificate for an hour and a bit on LOVE, their own in particular. It’s strikingly clever and enormously entertaining and punctuates hilarious comedy with moments of true poignancy.

Parker is a one-off - his creative mind doesn’t just go off on a tangent - it’s a virtual peripatetic double-helix that defies description (yes, I know I just described it!). While the overall genre might be Dance Theatre, it’s also satire, pantomime, sit-com, cabaret, audience participation and more. Parker never loses character for a moment, and Glenn’s slightly clumsy dancing is a tribute to the skills of a man who is in fact a superb dancer. Jo Stone is the perfect partner for him. As the brittle Rhonda, whose flamboyancy and set smile are masks for her emotional pain, she’s marvellous and quite fearless. The sheer physicality of the two together is quite extraordinary.

I don’t want to give too much away, but to see how cleverly the couple masks nudity in one scene - with Rhonda’s fox fur, and Glenn’s strategically placed bunch of grapes used to hilarious effect - is a highlight of the evening. I’m not sure that too many of the audience got the homage to Aesop’s fable “The Fox and the Grapes”, or certainly not until Rhonda’s fox started pulling Glenn’s grapes from their bunch, but the belly laughs were testament to both performers.

When the soiree moves to its third act, with Glenn and Rhonda pretentiously re-enacting the relationship cycle through 3 different readings of lines from pop songs of the seventies and eighties under the overall umbrella of Pat Benatar’s “Love is a Battlefield”, you realise that the 65 minutes has gone far too quickly. But Parker is a canny creator/director. He knows the truth of “leave the audience wanting more.”

Coral Drouyn

Photographer: Simon Wachter.