Blood Brothers: Review

Seven-(almost eight)-year-olds, Mickey and Eddie form an immediate bond when they meet by chance in a Liverpool park in the 1960s. Unruly, foul-mouthed Mickey thrills and appalls Eddie (‘Edward’ to his parents) with his unfettered language and antics. For his part, Mickey is disarmed by Eddie’s naively privileged take on life (and the fact that when Mickey tries to menace him into giving him a sweet, Eddie happily hands over the entire bag).

On Mickey’s initiative, each pricks a thumb and smears the blood across his palm, before clasping hands with the other. They are now, Mickey pronounces, blood brothers, bonded for life.

Little do they know, but they are also real brothers, twins, separated soon after birth, when Eddie’s “mother,” Mrs Lyons, wife of a successful businessman, bullied her cleaner, Mrs Johnstone (Mickey’s mum) into a secret pact, requiring her to give one of her newborn boys to her affluent yet childless employer. No one else, least of all the boys themselves, must ever know, insists Mrs Lyons, warning the superstitious Mrs Johnstone of fatal consequences if their secret ever gets out.

This is a tale of power and poverty, freedom and destiny, nature and nurture, love, sacrifice and betrayal. It is also, perhaps above all, a tale of “what the English call ‘class’.”

Love (of different kinds), is a theme of Willy Russell’s enduringly popular musical, Blood Brothers, and, much like that older romantic tragedy involving young people, Romeo and Juliet, the question posed to the audience is not how will this end, but why and how does it end that way? A powerful opening tableau vivant, with the night time Liverpool cityscape as backdrop, shows the bodies of the two boys (now, young men) being carried away on stretchers, while three grieving women (the two mothers and Linda, the girl both brothers loved) look on, bereft and inconsolable.

Blood Brothers tells a gripping story (with decent music). It is not by any means all doom and gloom. Sean Jones (Mickey), Joe Sleight (Eddie) and Gemma Brodrick (Linda) each has fun, carrying her or his character through from childhood to young adulthood. Mickey impresses Eddie by being able to spit some distance and to stretch his tattered school jumper over his knees. Linda rides imaginary horses with the boys and outshoots them with a variety of toy pistols and stones. Young Eddie rattles Mrs Lyons’s middle class prudery by using the “F” word for the very first time.

One of the best segments covers the three friends wrestling their way through adolescence. With a certain amount of complicity from Mrs Johnstone (she gives them the ticket money) Mickey and Eddie witness the cinematic delights of “Swedish Nymphomaniacs.” Meanwhile, Linda turns up for high school wearing something the average dad might describe as ‘more like a belt than a skirt!’ Whilst her outfit has a considerable impact on Mickey’s rioting hormones, he still can’t stammer his way to inviting her out. All hilarious (not to mention nostalgic for the more mature members of the audience).

Money and opportunity build an increasingly impenetrable wall between the two boys. The end arrives as one the most emotionally-loaded yet underrated in musical theatre. A moment of genuine brilliance from Russell. I confess I shed a tear or two (though, being blokey, I’m putting that down to excellent pre-show vodka martinis, dispensed with care and precision by the young bar person at Refuge, just over the road).

Sadly, I suspect one explanation for the continuing popularity of Blood Brothers is its undiminished relevance. So many of us are acutely aware of the growing gap between rich and poor, and of what this implies for any child’s life prospects.

A strong production (and this one draws an enormous, spontaneous ovation from a packed house) needs to know how to hit the script’s key dramatic moments. The opening tableau pulls us, adeptly, into the heart of the drama. Other plot points – the handing over of the twin, the first meeting between Mrs Johnstone and the child now called Edward Lyons, the final breech between the blood brothers (“Go, before I really hit you!”), the tragic finale – are all carefully crafted for maximum effect.

Originally directed by Bom Tomson and Bill Kenwright, the show is kept shipshape by resident director, Tim Churchill (who also takes the role of Mr Lyons). Musical director, Matt Malone pushes the score along with admirable textual sensitivity.

Sarah Jane Buckley lends humanity to the morally devious Mrs Lyons. Joe Sleight makes a lovable middle class ‘soft lad’ of Eddie, while Gemma Brodrick’s Linda blossoms endearingly from tomboy to teen vamp, before wilting affectingly into a careworn wife. Sean Jones’s Mickey begins as a charming little rogue, then grows to a believable troubled teenager, and his adulthood is played with brutally unsentimental truthfulness. Vivienne Carlyle rises to the many challenges of Mrs Johnstone’s role, both dramatically and vocally, from the vibrant working class girl (“sexy as Marilyn Monroe”) to the resilient single mother who “loves the bones” of all her children, to the distraught and broken middle-aged woman, finally accepting that there is no winning in life when “the devil has your number.”

A fine night out.

Blood Brothers is at The Palace Theatre, Manchester from 19-30 November 2024.