Blood Brothers: devastatingly good
Blood Brothers. Four decades old and yet as devastatingly relevant now as it ever was in its tale of the haves and have-nots, how the former can thrive through education and opportunity while the other falls through the gaps via poverty, crime, incarceration, depression and pills.
It’s at least 25 years since I first saw Willy Russell’s masterpiece on tour, and came away vowing that if I could ever sit through it without crying, I’d give up theatre for good. Such would be my stone-cold heart. And while the heart is older, perhaps more cynical, the eyes and brain certainly more critical, this latest UK tour, seen at Derby Theatre, still has the power to turn this critic into a mascara-covered mess of unashamed ugly sobbing.
Why Blood Brothers wields such an emotional punch has been the topic of many words, reviews, papers – it’s been on the curriculum for English and for Drama GSCE studies – and it’s easy to see why, with its stereotypical views on class, guilt, poverty, privilege, inequality and injustice. Plus nature v nurture, superstition and fate, coming of age. But lest we forget, stereotypes are thus because they have a basis in truth. Not all, but many. A lad born brought up on a council estate, fatherless, in poverty, is sadly more likely to turn to crime for money than one privately-educated by two middle-class parents.
So the show itself. If you are blissfully unaware of the plot, indulge me a brief overview. Mrs Johnstone struggles to raise her seven kids when she finds out she’s expecting twins. Her husband clears off with a younger model, and in desperation, she agrees to give one of the twins to the wealthy woman whose home she cleans.
Mickey is a little council estate lad, Eddie goes to private school and enjoys all the privilege his adopted status provides. Both boys are unaware of their connection, yet become firm friends, despite the efforts of the women to keep them apart. Add in Linda, who loves them both, and the dark looming presence of a narrator who constantly warns about supposed superstition of separating twins, and we have the relentless pull towards the inevitable tragic end.
The brilliance is mostly in the casting of Mickey, who has to take us from cheekly Liverpudlian seven-year-old, pulling an oversized, holey jumper over his knees, galloping around the estate on his pretend steed; via disinterested student, through hormonal teenager desperate for a snog, to young adult with a pregnant girlfriend, made redundant and finding the dole can’t make ends meet.
Sean Jones handles it as a master of his craft; and he should be having been involved with the show for nigh-on two decades, yet still gets away with his childlike “am nearly eight” poem. When he comes out of prison, addicted to anti-depressants, he genuinely seems, as his mother sings “fifteen years older”, with slurred, slowed speech and the movement of the tormented brain of the chronically depressed. It’s his likeability and fun through the early years that warms the heart, only to smash it into pieces in act two. Quiet desperation on the road to a devastating end.
Joe Sleight has an easier ride, as Eddie, but he avoids making the posh boy an irritant and we never lose the unease that Eddie doesn’t quite belong. And Sean Keany is a powerful foreboding presence as the narrator, with a great, soaring vocal.
But it’s Mrs Johnson who has to carry the show; it’s her family, her reluctant agreement which sets the course, and while Vivienne Carlyle is a veteran of Bill Kenwright musicals, she never quite seems to reach the powerful depths of the emotional gravitas. Yes I sobbed, but it was for Mickey, not his Mum. And as a mother, that probably tells you everything.
But don’t let that stop you. It’s still a brilliant piece of writing 40 years later, and the audience was on its feet before the lights even came up for curtain call. Just don’t forget to take tissues. I guarantee you’ll need them.