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I fully appreciate that up there on stage, those people performing, they are actors. I also understand that by definition they secure work due in no small part to their ability to convey, nay, fake real emotion and pass it off for our entertainment. So, knowing this as I do, to see half of the cast taking the last of their four curtain calls, faces streaked by tears, is nothing short of alarming.
Such is the power and thrall of Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers. Set around Liverpool in the 1950s, it is a tale of twins separated at birth. The first, secretly given away by its working-class housekeeper mother to her barren middle-class employer. The second son retained within the filled-to-bursting family terrace.
The story sees the mothers’ relationship inevitably sour, before continuing to follow the boys into young adulthood, their paths having first crossed when nearly eight and a then hitherto unknowing bond thereafter forged. Their friendship for life sealed in the mixing of their own blood.
Eddie – now of higher social status - goes to boarding school, university and into local government. Mickey - played by the excellent Sean Jones - finds himself accidentally caught up in the seamier side of life. His misfortune culminating in imprisonment when acting as a look-out for older-and-wilder, brother Sammy when a bungled attempted robbery goes fatally wrong.
Mickey’s downward spiral is exacerbated by this spell in prison. A descent blighted further still by prescription drug abuse, unemployment and disenchantment, his marriage to childhood sweetheart Linda suffering. Her now clandestine but innocent relationship with Eddie ultimately pushes Mickey – no longer on good terms with his sibling – to the brink of insanity. A police stand-off ensues, when at gunpoint, Mickey confronts his brother over his perceived affair with his wife. The showdown, and point where the twins’ mother, Mrs Johnstone, reveals the truth about the pair’s beginnings, sees both prophetically shot dead.
Lyn Paul is unbearably brilliant as Mrs Johnstone, the long-suffering Liverpudlian single-mother-of-nine. Her singing pitch-perfect, her passionate portrayal of the story’s flawed heroine an object lesson in the genre, her eyes heartbreakingly emotive at every turn.
The play is regarded as a classic of musical theatre; writer Willy Russell also contributing the words and music; the songs there solely to serve the storytelling. His portrayal of the vagaries afforded by a better start in life is pointedly illustrated by the twins contrasting appearance, demeanour, differing use of language and alternative leisure pursuits. The young Mickey - all broken windows, effin’ and blindin’, and girlie mags. Eddie - cricket, reading books, and homework.
The play is typically characterised as a study of Britain’s long-established and derided class system. But to summarise it as such is to do so unfairly. Written in 1981 and set initially in the depressed inner city streets of 1950s Liverpool, it is more an everyday narrative of struggle, opportunity, secrets and regret.
A standing ovation proof enough of the company’s capacity to convey all of the above. And do so in spades. Blood Brothers is taut throughout. Breathlessly at times. Its strength lies in the writer’s emotional intelligence when drawing character. All brought vividly to life by a talented band of actors’ commitment to conveying those emotions, intelligently.
Blood Brothers plays at Nottingham's Theatre Royal from Monday 29 March to Saturday 3 April 2010.
