Blood

Brothers

i
 Methuen Drama publications for GCSE students
Available and forthcoming

GCSE Student Editions

Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers
Simon Stephens’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the
Night-Time
Charlotte Keatley’s My Mother Said I Never Should
Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey

GCSE Student Guides

Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers by Ros Merkin
Simon Stephens’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the
Night-Time by Jacqueline Bolton
Dennis Kelly’s DNA by Maggie Inchley
Alan Bennett’s The History Boys by Steve Nicholson
J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls by Philip Roberts
R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End by Andrew Maunder
Charlotte Keatley’s My Mother Said I Never Should
by Sophie Bush
Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey by Kate Whittaker

ii
 Blood
Brothers
GCSE Student
Guide
ROS MERKIN
Series Editor: Jenny Stevens

Bloomsbury Methuen Drama

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

iii
 Bloomsbury Methuen Drama

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Imprint previously known as Methuen Drama

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© Ros Merkin 2016

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1988, to be identified as author of this work.

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iv
 CONTENTS

1 The Play 1

Introduction: Reading drama 1

Overview 2
Context 11
Themes 18
Character 30
Dramatic technique 44
Critical reception 59
Related work 63
Glossary of dramatic terms 67

2 Behind the Scenes 71

Willy Russell (Playwright) 71

Glen Walford (Director) 77
Peter Treganna (Actor) 82

3 Writing About the Play 89

Bibliography 101
Index 103

v
vi
 CHAPTER ONE

The Play

Introduction: Reading drama

Reading a play is a strange thing to do mostly because a play
text (the book you hold in your hands), unlike a novel, is
not a finished thing. Instead it functions as a blueprint for a
performance, a set of instructions for directors and actors and
designers to create a performance for an audience to watch
and listen to. When you are reading a play you are being asked
to use your imagination, to see how a character might look
and sound and move, to picture the places and spaces they
might inhabit on a stage. The writer does, of course, give you
lots and lots of clues and your job in reading is to try and work
out how these might all work in practice and also to think
about what is happening in-between the lines. Don’t forget
that if you are in a theatre watching a play, even when they are
not speaking, the actors playing the characters are still visible
to an audience. Something is still happening.
The information comes in two ways. There is the dialogue
or what characters say to each other. There are also the stage
directions. These might give you information on how the lines
are to be spoken or what a character is doing or where a scene
is set. The temptation when reading is to skip over these bits
(which in a script are usually in italics) to concentrate on and
prioritize what the characters are saying. This means you
would miss important moments in the play. For example, in

1
2 BLOOD BROTHERS

Blood Brothers, you would miss the moment where Mrs

Johnstone agrees to allow Mrs Lyons to have one of the twins.
She never says yes. She simply ‘nods’ (38). Or, later, you would
miss Mickey battling to stop taking his tablets, as during the
song ‘Light Romance’, the stage directions tell us

Throughout the following chorus we see MICKEY at work.

We see him go to take his pills. We see him make the effort
of not taking them. We see the strain of this upon him but
see that he is determined. (130–131)

So, the stage directions are important both in terms of plot

(what happens) but also in terms of character and you cannot
afford to miss either.
If you bear in mind when you are reading that while a book
tells us a story, a piece of theatre (which is what a play text is
destined to be) shows us a story or re-presents it in front of us,
this will help remind you to think about what you might be
hearing and seeing. After all, the two words we use for people
who go to the theatre (audience and spectator) come from
words that mean to listen and to watch. The best way to really
understand a play is to act it out. It might not be possible in
your school, although even the tiniest space will be enough to
try things out. If you cannot act the play out, then you might
have to make do with reading it aloud, in which case it is useful
to have someone reading the stage directions and to discuss
what sort of space each scene is happening in.

Overview

Things to do
● Think about the title of the play and make a list of all the
expectations you have about the play from the title.
 THE PLAY 3

Russell presents us with two problems that can make reading

the play difficult. Firstly, the play is divided into two acts but
whilst there are clearly different scenes, these are not marked in
the script as they are in many plays. He has obviously written
like this for a reason; it makes the narrative a seamless,
inevitable whole that moves relentlessly to the conclusion, but
it can make it hard to follow. When she is directing, Glen
Walford breaks the play into eighty-two units (or sections).
Whilst that number of sections might make things just as
confusing, it is useful to think about how you might break the
play down into parts to help you study the text. What follows
uses the ages of the twins as an organizing device. Secondly,
he provides no specific dates. There are some clues in the
text, for example, the mention of pounds, shillings and pence
(decimalization happened in 1971) and he has said that when
the narrator talks about today near the end of the play, that
relates to the time of the play’s first production. Whilst it is
hard to be very specific about dates, it is possible to identify
which decade each section takes place in.

Prologue (pp. 29–30)

Time: 1950s (including a moment in the 1980s)

The play starts at the end, the outline of two bodies marked
out on the stage. This means the audience know how it all
ends before it has even started, suggesting a fatalism (it will
be like this and nothing can change it) and allowing them
to concentrate on HOW and WHY it happens rather than
WHAT happens. Mrs Johnstone is introduced. She looks
old but in the past she danced and was lovelier (and sexier)
than Marilyn Monroe. Then her husband walked out on
her to dance with someone else, leaving seven children and
one more on the way. A sympathy is set up with her plight
and two key motifs (dancing and Marilyn Monroe) are
introduced.
4 BLOOD BROTHERS

Section 1: The twins are born and

parted (pp. 30–48)
Time: Late 1950s/early 1960s

Mrs Johnstone cannot even dream of happiness without real

life getting in the way and the milkman demanding payment
interrupts her reminiscences. She has not got enough money to
pay him. From offstage, the children complain and alone
onstage Mrs Johnstone tries to appease them. However, there
is a promise that things will get better. She has a new job and
will be able to feed them. Arriving for her first day at work, the
play juxtaposes Mrs Lyons and Mrs Johnstone putting the two
characters next to each other to emphasize the differences
between them; Mrs Lyons has new shoes but cannot have
children and Mrs Johnstone has a duster and a brush and
cannot stop having children. It also introduces the theme of
superstition as Mrs Lyons puts her new shoes on the table, the
moment underlined by the narrator.
Shocked to find out she is having twins, Mrs Johnstone’s
hopes that she was getting straight are dashed but Mrs Lyons
forms a plan to help them both. She offers to take one of the
babies, and, before Mrs Johnstone has even agreed, is stuffing
a cushion under her dress to simulate a pregnancy and planning
what to tell her husband. Mrs Johnstone nods her agreement
as she realizes that the child will have everything. She can see
Mrs Lyons is desperate and is promised she will be able to see
the child every day when she comes to work. Mrs Lyons insists
that it must be a binding agreement and makes Mrs Johnstone
swear on the Bible. Once again, the narrator adds to the tension
and for the first time we hear a phrase that will recur: ‘a debt
is a debt and must be paid’ (40). The optimism at the start has
evaporated and with the birth of the babies there is little to
celebrate.
Arriving back home from the hospital with the twins,
Mrs Johnstone is met by the debt collectors. She is behind with
 THE PLAY 5

her payments and the dawning realization through the song

‘Easy Terms’ is it is not just her furniture that is going to be
repossessed. Mrs Lyons arrives to collect her baby. Mrs
Johnstone tries to buy some time because ‘they’re a pair, they
go together’, but Mrs Lyons is insistent (42). Not wanting to
know which baby she takes, Mrs Johnstone agrees. Going
home with Mickey, the remaining twin, she explains to her
other children that the other twin has gone to heaven, one of
many lies that are woven through the text.
Mrs Johnstone goes back to work but Mrs Lyons is agitated,
her fear of Mrs Johnstone clear. She tells her husband that she
wants to fire the cleaner because she is acting like the baby’s
mother. Mr Lyons is concerned she is depressed, an intimation
about her later mental state. Getting money from her husband,
she sacks Mrs Johnstone, trying to pay her off. A desperate
Mrs Johnstone faced with losing her job and no longer being
able to see her son, threatens to take her child back or to tell
someone. Increasingly fearful, Mrs Lyons tries to stop her and
when all else fails, knowing that Mrs Johnstone is superstitious,
concocts a story that sounds like an old tale: if the children
learn they were once a pair, both will immediately die. It is
another lie. The narrator underlines the ominous undertones,
warning that ‘the devil’s got your number’ (47). A fearful Mrs
Johnstone returns home and locks herself in.

Section 2: Aged seven (but nearly eight)

(pp. 48–81)
Time: Seven years later. The mid- to late 1960s

Mickey is banished to play by the front door, his mother angry

he has been playing near the big houses in the park, where she
knows Edward lives. He is bored and lonely, wishing he was
his older brother Sammy. His boredom is broken by Edward
who has seen him playing near the park. Mickey demands
sweets which Edward readily gives and quickly, through
6 BLOOD BROTHERS

Edward’s delight at Mickey’s swearing and stories, a bond

forms. When they discover they were born on the same day,
they swear to be blood brothers. They are interrupted by
Sammy brandishing a toy gun and then discovered by Mrs
Johnstone who, on realizing who Edward is, tells him to beat
it or the bogey man will get him.
Back home, Edward reaches for his dictionary to look up
the new word. His mother insists there is no such thing as a
bogey man. At this moment, Mickey appears wanting to play.
Mrs Lyons works out who Mickey is and when Edward
declares he likes Mickey more than her, Mrs Lyons hits him
‘instinctively’ (60). Edward remains alone, watching, while the
children play games on the street with guns, foreshadowing
later events. Part of the gang is Linda, who stands up to Sammy
and then defends and comforts Mickey when all the others
turn on him.
Left alone with Linda, Mickey produces the airgun he has
stolen from Sammy and they go in search of Edward,
persuading him, despite his mother’s forbidding, to go to the
park. The gang is forming and Edward is excited by their
bravado.
The narrator sets the mood for the following scene
suggesting ‘[t]hey’re gonna take your baby away’ (67). Mrs
Lyons, distraught to discover Edward missing, calls her
husband home from work. He thinks she is over protective and
should get something for her nerves. She is convinced that
Edward is ‘drawn’ to ‘these people’ but she cannot explain the
truth to him (69). Instead, she tells him she is frightened and
wants to move. As they talk, he puts a pair of shoes on the
table. She sweeps them off, seemingly affected by Mrs
Johnstone’s superstitious beliefs, an idea underlined by the
narrator. The devil is still going to find them.
Unaware of this, the children are playing. Mickey stops them
firing the gun because Linda seems to be the only one who can
hit the target and they move on to throwing stones through
windows but get caught by a policeman. Edward, not realizing
the other two have been boasting earlier, says his name is Adolf
 THE PLAY 7

Hitler. They are all taken home in tears by the policeman, who
then deals very differently with the two families.
Persuaded by the encounter with the policeman that they
should move, Mr Lyons breaks the news to Edward claiming it
is because ‘Mummy’s not been too well’ (72). Edward, going to
say goodbye to Mickey, is met by Mrs Johnstone. She tries to
encourage him, saying he will love his new house and make
new friends. Edward says he will never forget them. She gives
him a locket with a picture of Mickey and herself, making him
promise to keep it a secret. He confesses he used to think ‘you
weren’t very nice’ but now he thinks she is ‘smashin’ ’, showing
the growing bond between mother and son (75). As Edward
says goodbye to Mickey, giving him the toy gun his father
bought him, he sets off unenthusiastically to the country.
Left in the city, Mickey misses his friend. In his garden in the
country, Edward is equally bored and alone. Their duet shows
their connections and an appreciation of their differences. The
dejection is broken by good news. Mrs Johnstone is being
rehoused to the country and ‘Bright New Day’ suggests a return
to the optimism of the start of the show for the Johnstone family.
The Act ends on this joyful, positive note, with Mrs Johnstone
convinced that they are starting all over again. The narrator’s
warnings about the devil seem not to have been borne out.

Section 3: The teenage years:

being fourteen (pp. 82–104)
Time: Late 1960s to early 1970s

The start of Act Two is still optimistic. Mrs Johnstone is

dancing again and teasing Mickey who is an awkward
fourteen-year-old, self-conscious about his appearance. She
has not forgotten her other son although she has not seen him
for years. The joyous Johnstone house stands in contrast to the
Lyons’ where a rather stiff and still fearful Mrs Lyons is
teaching Edward to waltz before he goes back to boarding
8 BLOOD BROTHERS

school. At the Johnstone’s, the concern is to get Mickey to

school and to Linda who is waiting for him at the bus stop.
Their relationship is developing, and after Sammy is chased off
by the police for pulling a knife on the bus conductor, Linda
tells Mickey she loves him and does not care who knows, much
to Mickey’s embarrassment.
The following two scenes show the differences between the
schools the twins attend and, at the same time, the similarities
between the boys. Edward has a promising future but is
suspended for refusing to take off his locket. Mickey is
suspended for saying school is boring and questioning the
usefulness of the education he is getting. Receiving the letter
about Edward’s suspension, Mrs Lyons discovers that the
locket contains pictures of Mickey and Mrs Johnstone but
Edward will not tell her where he got it from. It is, he tells her,
a secret, and everybody’s got secrets. The audience, in on the
truth, will see the irony here. The tension is once again raised
by the narrator. The devil is getting closer.
Mickey and Linda go for a walk. She tries to get him to
return her feelings. He is too self-conscious so she tries to make
him jealous, before abandoning him. Mickey wishes he was
more like the boy he can see in the window and the boy wishes
he was more like Mickey before they recognize each other. The
twins are reunited. Edward offers to help Mickey find the
words to say to Linda, suggesting they go and see ‘how it’s
done’ at the films (97). They go off happily to get some money
from Mickey’s house but Mrs Lyons has seen them and follows
them, with the narrator reminding her that there are debts to
be paid. At Mrs Johnstone’s, the boys try to cover up what film
they are going to see, in a scene that suggests a warmth and
closeness between the three of them. As they leave, Mrs Lyons
breaks Mrs Johnstone’s good mood, confronting her and
accusing her of following them. Her neurosis and her sadness
at having a son who will never really be hers bursts to the
surface and when Mrs Johnstone refuses to be paid off again
she lunges at her with a kitchen knife, cursing her as a witch,
in one of the major confrontations of the play.
 THE PLAY 9

Leaving the cinema dazzled by what they have seen, the

twins bump into Linda and her friend. There is a moment of
good humour which culminates in them all cheeking the
policeman. Now, the gang of three is reunited. Things look
optimistic again.

Interlude: Summer sun: the teenage

years (pp. 104–110)
Time: Early to mid-1970s

In a sequence led by the narrator, the happiest part of the play

unfolds over a series of summers which take the twins from
fourteen to eighteen. There is lots of fun (a funfair, sharing
dreams and taking funny photographs). There are also hints of
what is to come as Linda finds herself caught in the middle of
the boys in a game of piggy-in-the-middle and Edward finally,
if cautiously, tells her that he loves her although he knows that
she loves Mickey. However, the narrator is ready to remind the
audience of the tragedy to come. If the teenagers cannot see the
broken bottle in the sand, the audience must not forget that
they are there. The sequence ends in an upbeat mood. Edward,
about to leave for university, finally gets Mickey to ask Linda
out and heads off with promises of Christmas parties to come.

Section 4: Adults (pp. 110–130)

Time: Late 1970s to early 1980s

Everything is quickly brought back down to reality and the

pace of the story picks up as it moves towards the conclusion
that we have known was inevitable. Linda is pregnant. She and
Mickey marry, the wedding colliding with Mickey being made
redundant. It is just a sign of the times, as the stage fills with
others on the dole. Christmas approaches. Edward returns
from university ready for the parties but is met by a very
10 BLOOD BROTHERS

different Mickey with nothing to celebrate. Explaining the

realities of life on the dole to Edward, the scene shows the
growing gap between the two. They argue for the first time.
Mickey faced with the harsh realities of adult life sees Edward
as still being a child and pushes him away. Bumping in to Linda
as he leaves, Edward also discovers that they are married. This
encounter is intercut with Sammy persuading Mickey to be a
lookout for him and as the pace picks up even more (and the
narrator reminds the audience that there is no getting off
without the price being paid), the scene explodes into the
shooting of a man and Mickey and Sammy being arrested.
In prison, Mickey becomes depressed and the parallels with
Marilyn Monroe’s life are returned to, although this time not
suggesting the earlier happiness. Addicted to anti-depressants,
Mickey gets out of prison but just as he has pushed Edward
away, so he pushes Linda away. She tries to help him by getting
him a job and a house from someone she knows. Although she
does not admit who this is, the audience (and Mickey) know
Edward is handing out things again, just as earlier he handed
out sweets. Pushed even further by Mickey’s refusal to stop
taking the drugs and worn down by life, Linda is drawn to
Edward and they start a light romance.
Mrs Lyons sees what is happening and shows Mickey and
from this moment the stage explodes in panic. In his hunt for
Edward, Mickey breaks ‘through groups of people, looking,
searching’ (126). Mrs Johnstone is screaming and banging
on Linda’s door shouting for her. The narrator is telling us
that a man has gone mad and the devil’s ‘callin’ your number
up today/Today/Today/TODAY !’ (126–7). They are moving
relentlessly towards their fate. The final confrontation starts
more calmly. Mickey, armed with Sammy’s gun, interrupts
Edward at the council. He can see clearly now he has stopped
taking the pills and is convinced Edward, who has got
everything while he has nothing, is trying to take away Linda,
the last thing he has left. Any talk of their friendship is now in
the past tense. For a brief moment, things look as though they
might not end up as we expect. Mickey admits he cannot even
 THE PLAY 11

shoot Edward, nor does he know if the gun is loaded. It is the

arrival of Mrs Johnstone that final brings everything falling
down. When she tells them the truth, Mickey realizes he too
could have had everything and with a despairing howl of rage
he waves his gun at Edward, blowing him apart. Mickey is
killed by four guns fired by the police. Mrs Johnstone is left to
survey her two dead sons wishing it had all been a scene ‘from
an old movie of Marilyn Monroe’ (130).

Things to do
● In small groups try to tell the story of the play taking
turns to add a sentence. This could also be done as a
written exercise where you allow yourself a limited
number of sentences to tell the story.
● Make a list of the ten most important moments in the
play in the order they happen. In class, you can try to
create still images of these moments and show them to
the rest of the class. See which other moments different
groups might have picked and create a ‘final’ list in the
class which everyone agrees with.
● Write the ‘blurb’ for the back of a new edition of Blood
Brothers, thinking about what might encourage someone
to want to read the play.

Context
Production history
● November 1981: Original version, with one song,
performed at schools around Merseyside by Merseyside
Young People’s Theatre.
12 BLOOD BROTHERS

● 8 January 1983: Rewritten version with songs opened

at Liverpool Playhouse, running for twelve weeks.
● 11 April 1983: Transferred to the Lyric Theatre in
London’s West End running until 22 October 1983.
● 28 July 1988: Following two national tours, reopened at
the Albery Theatre, London, produced by Bill Kenwright,
transferring to the Phoenix Theatre in 1991 running for
twenty-four years, closing on 27 October 2012.
● International productions have included America,
Australia, Japan, South Korea, Russia, Poland, Israel,
Germany, Holland and Denmark. In 2014, it was
adapted by David Kramer for performances in South
Africa, the first time that Willy Russell had allowed the
musical to be adapted.

Political context
1. Thatcher
In 1979, Margaret Thatcher arrived at 10 Downing Street, the
first woman prime minister in British history. She became one
of the few prime ministers to have a political system named
after them and Thatcherism set out to right the problems of the
country through deregulation (removing government controls),
cuts in spending and taxes and privatization (selling off assets).
One of Thatcher’s central political beliefs was a determination
to make people stand on their own two feet, to look after
themselves rather than to be dependent on the state and on
welfare. This was combined with a belief that success came to
those who chose to work hard. The focus was on the individual,
an idea summed up in an interview for Woman’s Own in 1987
when she declared ‘there’s no such thing as society [. . .] only
individual men and women and their families’. People, she
continued, must look after themselves first.
 THE PLAY 13

One impact of Thatcherism was unemployment which rose

to three million in January 1983 (one-in-eight of the work-
force), a figure which it did not go below until 1987. Hardest
hit was Northern Ireland, closely followed by northern
England and Scotland. It was a political system that split the
country (she is sometimes called the Marmite Prime Minister).
Some people did make lots of money, particularly in the City
of London. Others felt as though they benefitted from Thatcher
through schemes such as the Right to Buy which allowed
council house tenants to buy their houses for anything up to a
70 per cent discount. Others resisted her policies and one
defining event of the Thatcher era was the 1984–5 Miners
Strike. It was ‘one of the most bloody and tragic disputes of
modern times’, in which Thatcher took on and beat the union
with the closure of 150 pits and the decimation of the
communities associated with them (Marr, 2008, 411).

2. The 1970s
It is possible to characterize Blood Brothers as a critique of
Thatcherism but whilst this reflects when the play was first
produced, in the play, Mickey is faced with losing his job in an
earlier decade, the 1970s, when the Labour Party was in power.
Labour had formed the government in 1974 with a very small
majority at a time when the economy was in trouble and inflation
was high (24 per cent in 1975). They faced a series of financial
crisis and were forced to borrow money, a loan which came with
strings attached including cuts in public spending (i.e. welfare
and education). Unemployment started to rise although it was
never as bad as it later became under the Tories (it averaged 4
per cent during the decade) but manufacturing industry was in
decline and many familiar household names disappeared. The
1970s ended in The Winter of Discontent when public sector
workers struck, refusing an imposed pay rise. There are two
abiding images of this winter: rubbish piling up on the streets
and the dead not being buried. The latter occurred in Liverpool
where over 300 bodies were piled up in cold storage as the
14 BLOOD BROTHERS

council discussed emergency plans to dispose of them at sea or

even to ask relatives to dig their own graves. The result of all this
upheaval was the election which Thatcher won, during which
the Tories used a poster which has become one of the most
famous election posters. It shows a snaking dole queue above
which is the slogan ‘Labour Isn’t Working’.

3. Liverpool
Russell has always been at pains to argue that Blood Brothers
is not just a Liverpool play and its international success is a
testament to its universality. He maintains,

I just happen to write in Liverpool but I use Liverpool as a

metaphor for wherever. I know it’s the same in Bradford,
I know it’s the same in Burnley, I know it’s the same in
Glasgow and Newcastle. All right they have geographical,
regional, idiomatic differences, but the stories I tell set in
Liverpool are stories that happen in other languages in
Bradford, Burnley, Glasgow and Newcastle.
GILL , 1992, 1

But, the play is set in Liverpool and was first performed in

Liverpool so whilst the more general context is relevant, it is
also important to look at how it specifically impacted on
Liverpool. The negative effects of Thatcherism were particularly
felt in the north of the country (note the cities Russell chooses
to mention above) which were the manufacturing heartland of
the country. The unemployment of the 1970s and 1980s hit
Liverpool particularly hard. Dependent for jobs on the docks
and manufacturing industry, much trade moved from America
to Europe and Liverpool’s docks, being on the west of the
country, lost out. Between 1966 and 1977, 350 factories closed
or moved elsewhere. By 1978, Liverpool had the highest
unemployment rate in the country. In the 1980s things got
worse. By 1981, 20 per cent of the city’s workforce were
unemployed and ‘it was reported that there were just 49 jobs on
 THE PLAY 15

offer for 13,505 youngsters registered as unemployed’ (Murden,

2006, 428). As du Noyer states ‘the 1980s saw Liverpool’s old
fame replaced by infamy. Suddenly this was Bad News Town.
Somebody dubbed it the Museum of Horrifying Example’ (du
Noyer, 2004, 174). Such was the sense of dereliction that an
American band, ‘The Bangles’, released a cover version of a
song where the chorus repeated ‘I’m going down to Liverpool
to do nothing all the days of my life’.
As in the rest of the country, there was opposition. The local
council in Liverpool was for a period in the 1980s at
loggerheads with the government. Liverpool was also the scene
of the Toxteth riots in 1981. Touted as race riots, they were as
much to do with unemployment and police harassment as they
were to do with race. Thatcher’s response to these in her
memoirs is telling of her thinking.

‘I had been told that some of the young people got into
trouble through boredom and not having enough to do,’ she
wrote ‘But you had only to look at the grounds around
those houses with the grass untended, some of it waist high,
and the litter, to see that this was a false analysis. They had
plenty of constructive things to do if they wanted. Instead, I
asked myself how people could live in such circumstances
without trying to clear up the mess.’
THATCHER quoted in Marr, 2008, 390

Subsequently, Government papers, released in 2011, bear out

the attitude of some people in Thatcher’s government towards
the city, urging her to abandon it to managed decline. In the
words of du Noyer, ‘[t]he Beat City became the Beaten City’
(du Noyer, 2004, 175).

Theatrical context: Andrew Lloyd Webber

Michael Billington recounts a story of Peter Hall, then director
of the National Theatre, being told off by Mrs Thatcher for
16 BLOOD BROTHERS

complaining about the state of British Theatre. She pointed out

to him that British theatre was famous the world over. ‘Look,’
Billington reports she triumphantly said, ‘at Andrew Lloyd
Webber’ (Billington, 2007, 284).
Andrew Lloyd Webber was everywhere in the 1980s.
Alongside the theatre producer, Cameron Mackintosh, who
was responsible for Schoenberg and Boublil’s Les Miserables
(1985) and Miss Saigon (1989), he dominated and defined
British theatre. Although he had started working in the 1970s
(his first major success was Jesus Christ Superstar in 1972), the
1980s produced a string of hugely successful shows: Cats
(1981), Starlight Express (1984) and Phantom of the Opera
(1986). Cats, a ‘statistic-busting phenomenon’ went on to run
in London’s West End for twenty-one years, being performed
in thirty countries and seen by over 75 million people
(Billington, 2007, 288). The Phantom of the Opera, according
to the show’s website, has been seen by over 140 million people
in 151 cities and taken in excess of $6 billion (the highest
grossing film to date, Avatar, took $2.7 billion).
The musical was the dominant theatrical form of the decade
and in particular the megamusical, big in the scale of the story,
enormous in the scale of the spectacle on stage. The lack of
dialogue (these were mostly musicals that were sung all the
way through) meant that they had global appeal and could
be exported worldwide, like Coca-Cola and Levi’s Jeans,
crossing barriers of language and culture. These musicals,
argues Billington, offered the audiences ‘both escape from
social reality and spiritual uplift’ and ‘ultimately turned into
the theatrical equivalent of multinational companies. In their
wealth making capacity and corporatism, musicals were the
perfect expression of Thatcherite values’ (Billington, 2007,
286). The link to Thatcherite values of the individual can be
seen clearly in Starlight Express. The show revolves around a
race to become the fastest engine in the world between Rusty
(a steam train relegated to the sidings), Electra (an electric
train) and Greaseball (a diesel train). As Rusty hits rock
bottom, thinking he will win neither the race nor the heart of
 THE PLAY 17

Pearl, the mystical force of the title is revealed and Rusty

discovers that he himself is the magical Starlight Express. Faith
in himself restored, he goes on to win both the race and Pearl.
Musicals in the 1980s, as Michael Billington suggests,
served a dual function: to ‘distract us from the daily realities of
Thatcher’s Britain while exemplifying the pursuit of profit that
was its guiding principle’ (Billington, 2007, 294). They were
stories of nineteenth-century opera houses, the Vietnam War
via Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly and cats going up to
heaven. Blood Brothers, with its local accents and setting, with
its implied critique of Thatcherism and without any roller
skates or crashing chandeliers, represents a very different kind
of work as Peter Taylor’s review of the show suggests.

Emerging during the decade that landed us with Cats and

Starlight Express, Blood Brothers was always something of
an anomaly as an Eighties musical. It dealt with ordinary
recognised people for a start, rather than a ménage of poetic
moggies or a set of singing choo-choos. It was on a humane
scale too, you did not go out humming the lavish set and the
budget.
TAYLOR , 1998

Theatrical context: Liverpool

In the programme for the original West End transfer of the
show, playwright Bill Morrison, who was working with Willy
Russell at Liverpool Playhouse at the time, described Blood
Brothers as ‘a new sound from an old history’. He cites the
Mersey poets, Roger McGough, Adrian Henri and Brian Patten
who took the poem off the page, stood up and told the story.
After them, music was added to the words by The Beatles and
both of these influenced the kind of work being produced at
Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre where Willy Russell started out
as a playwright in the 1970s. Here work was made that had a
18 BLOOD BROTHERS

firm local commitment, an abundance of music and an informal

and lively style of presentation. He also locates Willy Russell’s
work in an oral tradition, stories that are passed on by word of
mouth rather than written down. ‘In the same way as the poets
stood up and lifted the poem off the literary page’, he concludes,
‘he has reaffirmed theatre as rich spoken and sung language –
it is the robust lyricism of ordinary people.’ To Bill Morrison’s
context should also be added the rich history of folk music in
Liverpool (at the peak of its revival in the 1960s there were 72
folk clubs in the city), of which Willy Russell was a part in the
1960s with his band Kirkby Town Three.

Things to do
● Pick a scene from the play and write down what you would
need to change to update it to the present day. Take a
couple of examples you have noted down and rewrite some
of the play’s dialogue and stage directions accordingly.
● Choose a city that you have experience and/or knowledge
of and consider how Blood Brothers would need to be
adapted if it was set there.

Themes
Fate and destiny
The final question the narrator puts to the audience asks if we
blame superstition or class for the tragedy, highlighting both
of these as main themes. Both can be connected with a sense of
destiny or fate and the structure of the play, in which we see
where events will end up at the start, suggests a strong sense of
the inevitable or the unalterable. Things have to be like this and
there is nothing that can change them. Superstition too suggests
 THE PLAY 19

a belief in predetermination. If you put new shoes on the table or

see a lone magpie, something bad will happen. Some ways of
understanding class suggest that there is an inevitability about
your life because of the class you are born into. So both
superstition and class are connected in Blood Brothers to
questions of destiny and there is a strong sense of fatalism in the
play. Things could not have happened differently. Or could they?
Russell does not blame any one character for what happens but
there are moments where if characters acted differently, fate
could have been changed. While class and a belief in superstition
are key here, individual responsibility also has its place.

Believing in superstition
It is the narrator who reminds us throughout about superstitions
from the shoes on the table and salt being spilt to breaking
mirrors and walking on pavement cracks. However, it is Mrs
Johnstone who first mentions them. As Mrs Lyons puts her
shopping on the table, she is horrified, stopping mid-sentence
to explain that you never put new shoes on the table because
‘you never know what’ll happen’ but in response to being
asked if she is superstitious, she claims she is not (33).
Not all the characters in the play believe in superstitions. At
the outset, the Lyons family reject them. When Mrs Johnstone
tells Edward to go home before the bogey man gets him, he has
no idea what she means by the phrase and has to look it up in the
dictionary. Mrs Lyons is damning of a ‘silly’ mother who would
use that phrase and adamant that there is no such thing. But as
the influence of the Johnstone’s becomes apparent on Edward, he
starts to believe in superstitions telling his mother not to look at
a magpie because it stands for sorrow. Mrs Lyons still condemns
superstition as the kind of silly thing that Mickey said but she has
already shown that she too is starting to believe. She stops mid-
sentence as her husband puts a pair of shoes on the table and
rushes to sweep them off. Her conversion can be seen to come
from a sense of fear and foreboding. ‘If we stay here I feel that
20 BLOOD BROTHERS

something terrible will happen’, she tells her husband, echoing

Mrs Johnstone’s comment to her (68). She becomes a figure very
like the bogey man herself, the mad woman who lives on the hill
and scares the children. Of all the characters, Mr Lyons presents
himself as the most rational, consistently refusing to to get taken
in by ‘stupid superstition’ (75).
There are other references woven into the play to
superstitions. The number seven recurs from Mrs Johnstone’s
seven children – to the seven years between each age the twins
appear and Mickey being sentenced to seven years in prison. It
is often seen as a lucky number but there are seven deadly sins
and a broken mirror means seven years bad luck. Superstition
is also connected with religion; Mrs Johnstone is made to swear
on the bible and the ‘thing’ was done ‘in the name of Jesus’ (39).
There is also a suggestion that Mrs Johnstone is Catholic (she
dances with a picture of the Pope). Russell’s argument here is to
question people’s belief in superstition (and by inference
religion) as something both powerful and dangerous.
Is superstition to blame? There is an argument to be made
that if Mrs Johnstone had not believed in Mrs Lyons’ concocted
story about twins being separated then none of the ensuing
events would have happened, but it is only one side of the
question being asked of us at the end.

Class or nature v nurture

Class is a complex idea. What is easier to say is that class
affects how people are able to live their lives. It impacts on
where you live, how you speak, the opportunities and education
you have, the work you do. It can also be seen to impact on the
way you behave. Edward, for example, is polite (Mrs Johnstone
imagines how a child brought up in the Lyons house would not
fight or be found ‘effin’ and blindin’ ’) (38).
In Blood Brothers, the impact of class is key and the classes
are seen to be in opposition to each other. It is possible to
develop this and see the issue of class as analogous to a divided
 THE PLAY 21

nation, a point Irving Wardle makes, arguing Blood Brothers is

‘a fable of the two nations represented here’ (Wardle, 1983).
The implications can be seen in the comparison between Mrs
Johnstone and Mrs Lyons, obvious from early on. They are
both instantly recognizable class stereotypes (see the section
on dramatic structure for how this works in terms of language
and costume). Mrs Johnstone has to go to work whereas there
is no mention of Mrs Lyons working. Instead she can afford to
employ a cleaner. Mrs Johnstone is warm hearted; Mrs Lyons
is cold. Mrs Johnstone lives in a terraced house and then on an
estate; Mrs Lyons lives in a large house by the park and then in
a house on top of the hill. These differences can then be seen to
play out in the lives of the twins, in particular at school.
Edward is at private boarding school where he is ‘doing very
well’ and goes on to university (88). Mickey’s school is a
Secondary Modern1 which is ‘all boredom and futility’ (89).
Here, he does not learn anything that will be useful for him
when he leaves and the expectation is that he will immediately
get a job. Edward, it is suggested (because he can find Mickey
and Linda a house) has a well-paid management job. Mickey
ends up with a manual job making-up boxes.
Class also impacts on how people are treated. The most
obvious example of this is the response of the policeman to the
parents. Confronting Mrs Johnstone, he threatens her with
having to appear in court again, insistent that it was a serious
crime. ‘There’ll be no more bloody warnings from now on’, he
tells her (71). With the Lyons family, he shares a glass of scotch,
calls Edward a good lad and Mr Lyons sir and sees the
misdemeanor as ‘more of a prank’, suggesting that Mr Lyons
docks his pocket money. ‘Make sure he keeps with his own
kind’, he advises, suggesting he thinks Mickey is to blame (72).
Alongside questions about the impact of class, Blood
Brothers also raises questions about whether nature (genetic

1
Comprehensive schools were established between 1965 and 1975. Until then
there were Grammar schools if you passed an examination at 11 or Secondary
Modern schools if you failed.
22 BLOOD BROTHERS

make-up) or nurture (upbringing) defines a person’s chances in

life. Twins are seen to be genetically identical, so differences
between them will be down to their upbringing. However,
it is worth remembering that this may only be the case
where twins are identical (genetics is a complex and still
developing area of science). Fraternal twins (i.e. twins who
are not identical) do not share the same genes; there are
many examples of twins who are a boy and a girl who clearly
do not share the same genes. In Blood Brothers, we know
they are twins but not if they are identical but there are
moments that suggest nature defines your life, in particular
Edward’s growing affinity with Mrs Johnstone, his natural
mother. By contrast, his relationship with his adoptive mother
becomes increasingly distant. He also becomes increasingly like
Mickey as their friendship develops, talking back to his mother
and adopting the language used by his twin, saying hi-ya
instead of hello. This could suggest him reverting to his natural
state and his seemingly natural affinity with Mickey alongside
Mrs Lyons’ assertion that he is ‘drawn’ to ‘these people’ adds
weight to an argument about the importance of nature (68–9).
Mickey’s final cry of ‘I could have been him’ suggests that he
had the potential to have been like Edward if he had been
given different life (or class) chances (129). It is an idea reflected
by Billington’s review which suggests ‘the moral is blindingly
clear that environment counts for more than heredity and that
class-structure divides natural kin’ (Billington, 1983). Nurture
is more important than nature.

But will having money make you happy?

People suffer in Blood Brothers because they do not have
money. ‘Ey, Mother, I’m starvin’ an’ there’s nothin’ in’,
complains one of the Johnstone children (31). Mrs Johnstone’s
response is to promise the kids they will ‘live like kings’ and
‘bright young things’ when she brings ‘home the dough’ (32).
Children cannot, she knows ‘live on love alone’ (35). So, does
 THE PLAY 23

Blood Brothers suggest that money (or having stuff) will bring
you happiness?
Money does, at the start, equate with power. Mrs Lyons has
power over Mrs Johnstone because she pays her wages and
can give her a week off work on full pay. She uses her wealth
to persuade Mrs Johnstone to give her the baby and uses
money to try and solve her problems. She can afford to move
her family away and she can afford to try and bribe Mrs
Johnstone to move again. When Edward offers Mickey money
at Christmas he seems to think, like his mother, that money
can solve problems. For the working class characters, on the
other hand, the lack of money makes them powerless. Mrs
Johnstone cannot afford to keep both twins and has to accept
Mrs Lyons’ proposition.
At the same time, money does not always seem to be the
answer. The kids may be hungry but the lack of money does
not stop them from using their imagination and playing games
together. By contrast, Edward, who has money, is lonely. Nor
does Edward’s money stop him having the same adolescent
problems as Mickey. He too does not know what to say to girls
and he too is worried about bad breath and eyes that do not
match. Nor can money buy back his blood brother. Mrs Lyons
is not made happy by money and cannot buy her way out of
trouble and unhappiness. She also thinks that her promise of
all the good things in life for her son (even silver trays to have
his meals on) will make him love her, but it does not.
This does not mean that getting money and things is not a
temptation. Mrs Johnstone is taken in by the things in the
catalogue even though she knows she cannot afford them. Sammy
goes from trying to save some money on his bus fare to violent
robbery. Mickey, desperate for money, is persuaded to join him
by the thought of where he could take Linda if he ‘had cash like
that’ (116). But, the pursuit of money and stuff means there is
always a price to be paid. Mrs Johnstone has to watch as her
things are repossessed. Sammy and Mickey both end up in prison.
In the end, money might equate with power but it does not bring
happiness and everyone’s lives are in tatters at the conclusion.
24 BLOOD BROTHERS

Dreaming of escape
Jaspar Rees claims that ‘no one understands escapism like
Willy Russell’, and many of his plays contain characters who
try to escape (or dream of escaping) although they are often
prevented by other people (Rees, 2010). In Blood Brothers,
although there is a strong sense of fate, this does not stop
people dreaming of a better life and wanting to escape or
dreaming of being someone different. Mrs Johnstone lives
much of her life in a fantasy world. She spins dreams of food
for the children, conjuring up pictures of ham and jam and
spam and even milkshake for the baby (31). She dreams of a
new home where nobody has heard of them, where the washing
stays clean on the line and where she will have a front room
for best so that if the Pope happens to fly in from Rome he can
eat toast and drink tea with her. From this last aspiration we
can see that her bright new day has little relationship to reality
and although she does go dancing with the milkman (and gets
asked out by the judge), as soon as they arrive in the country
things start to go wrong. Sammy climbs on a cow which turns
out to be a bull, Donna Marie steps in something nasty and it
is not long before Sammy is in trouble for burning down the
school. Such reality checks do little to stop her dreaming and
at the end of the play, she is still asking the audience to tell her
that the whole story is just a dream. Mrs Lyons dreams too.
Firstly of a child and then of moving away from the people she
thinks are drawing Edward away from her. As with Mrs
Johnstone, her dreams of escape do not work. None of the
dreaming seems to help the characters really escape.
Other characters have their dreams of change too. Edward
and Mickey dream about being more like each other. Edward
dreams of Linda loving him, of bringing her flowers and taking
her on trips to the sea. Linda dreams that everything will be
alright when Mickey gets a job and they get a house and she
dreams about the possibility of becoming ‘the girl inside the
woman’ again (123). There are, the narrator tells us, moments
in life when ‘everything is possible’, the world’s within your
 THE PLAY 25

reach if only ‘we didn’t live in life, as well as dreams’ (106).

Living is different to dreaming. The broken bottles are still in
the sand, the oil is in the water and while you may have a
moment when ‘you can’t understand/How living could be
anything other than a dream’, real life soon reappears (106).

Childhood, growing up and friendship

As children, the twins are determined to stay friends despite the
obstacles put in their paths. They bridge their class differences
in a way that indicates things could be different, suggesting
there is something to celebrate about the openness of the young
or to regret about the acquired prejudice of their parents.
They very quickly and seemingly naturally become firm
friends, blood brothers. When Sammy derides Edward by calling
him ‘a poshy’, Mickey declares ‘he’s my best friend’ and their
childhood is shown as a carefree time of games and sharing
sweets (55). Almost until the end, they then stick together, despite
the adults best efforts to keep them apart. Mrs Johnstone forbids
Mickey from playing near the park and tells Edward to ‘beat it’
(57). Mrs Lyons insists it is Edward’s bedtime when Mickey
comes to see if he can play. She then tells Edward never to go
where boys like that live because he is not the same as them.
Edward does not understand this idea at all. In fact, he tells his
mother that he likes Mickey more than her (the boys are united
in both thinking that their mothers are mad). In an attempt to
finally separate them, Mrs Lyons moves, but even this fails.
Mickey manages to get some money to visit him on the bus (and
in a poor family that suggests a commitment from him) but does
not know where to go. They find each other once again, their
second meeting mirroring the first as Mickey replaces the
demand for a sweet with a demand for a cigarette, staying close
friends throughout their childhood and adolescence.
It is only when they are adults, when Edward comes back
from university and Mickey has lost his job, that the rift appears
and the adult Mickey tells Edward to ‘piss off’ (115). Where once
26 BLOOD BROTHERS

they stood together, now they wear different shoes. ‘In your shoes,
I’d be the same’, Mickey tells Edward, but ‘I am not in your shoes.
I’m in these looking at you’ (115). The scene, with Mickey
throwing the money he is offered to the ground, echoes an earlier
scene suggesting that they have both become like their mothers
and are no longer the children able to bridge the gaps. ‘Go on . . .
beat it,’ Mickey tells Edward, ‘before I hit y’’ (115). Edward
slowly backs away. Adulthood leads Mickey to reject Edward.

Secrets, lies, deceit and guilt

There are many different kinds of lies that people tell and many
different reasons for people telling lies – and untruths run
throughout the play with almost all the characters telling lies or
having secrets. Linda does not tell Mickey (or Mrs Johnstone)
who has sorted out the house and the job. Mickey and Linda lie
to Edward about saying dead ‘funny things’ to the police (67).
Edward will not tell his mother where he has got the locket
from or why he wears it. ‘It’s a secret’, he tells her, echoing the
words Mrs Johnstone said when she gave it to him. ‘It’s just a
secret, everybody has secrets, don’t you have secrets?’ (92).
There is one big lie that runs through the heart of Blood
Brothers, a lie shared by the audience that is only revealed to
Mickey and Edward at the very end of the play. It colours the
whole play leading to more and more lies being told, snowballing
until the two brothers find themselves caught in a web of
falsehoods that leaves them feeling guilty and, in the case of
Mrs Lyons, eaten up by deceit and mistrust. Mrs Johnstone
cannot tell her children the truth when she comes back from the
hospital with only one child, although her story that he is in
heaven and has everything he wants is not far from the truth.
Mrs Lyons cannot tell the truth about why she wants £50 from
her husband or about why she wants to move. It is her distrust
of Mrs Johnstone, her refusal to believe that she is not following
her, that leads her to go mad, to try and stab Mrs Johnstone and
then to tell Mickey about Edward and Linda. In the end, it is
 THE PLAY 27

only when the truth comes out that the tragedy unfolds in the
moment that Mrs Johnstone tells Mickey that they are brothers.
So, it is possible to argue that it is lies and deceit rather than
class or superstition that causes the death of the twins.

Motifs
Dancing
Dancing is usually associated with being happy and there are
many references in the play where dancing is associated with
happiness. Mrs Johnstone, in particular, dances when she is
happy. It is associated with her as a young woman meeting her
husband. It is associated with her joy at being told she has a new
house when she dances with a picture of the Pope and dreams
of gentlemen friends taking her dancing to local bands. She is so
happy to get her job with Mrs Lyons – that we see her dancing
to work, acquiring a brush, dusters and mop on the way and she
is clearly glad to see Edward again when, as the boys go off to
the cinema, she is left lilting ‘the “We Go Dancing” line’ (100).
For both Mickey and Edward, dancing is a sign of affection;
they want to dance with the people they love. Yet, these are
fleeting moments of happiness. Mrs Johnstone’s husband leaves
her to dance with someone else, she loses her job and in the
moments after her delight at seeing Edward again, Mrs Lyons
bursts into the kitchen and tries to stab her.
There are also references to dancing which are not quite so
cheerful. The image of the awkward fourteen-year-old Edward
being taught by his mother to waltz stands in stark contrast to
Mickey’s secret dancing or Edward’s joyful grabbing of Linda’s
mate who he waltzes round the street while singing ‘Tits, tits, tits
. . .’ (102). There is also a darker inference in the reference to
Linda and Edward dancing as friends and to Mickey’s invitation
to his wife to get dressed up because he is going to take her
dancing. As the play moves towards its conclusion, dancing
stops being a measure of happiness and becomes a representation
of something darker. In prison, Mickey’s mind has gone dancing
28 BLOOD BROTHERS

and there is ‘no cause for dancing’ suggesting there will be no

more happiness, however short-lived it might be (121).

Marilyn Monroe
The image of Marilyn Monroe, which adorned the gauze2 for
the first production of the musical, is woven throughout the
play connecting to both Mrs Johnstone and Mickey and
tracing their lives in a reflection of her own. Her importance as
a symbol is suggested by the fact that the first full song is called
‘Marilyn Monroe’ and her name is the last thing heard in the
show. Her image is used in two main ways. At times, she
represents sexiness, lovely legs, bright young things – and the
kind of girl Mickey dreams about at night. Towards the end of
the play, the references become darker. In prison, Mickey
‘treats his ills with daily pills’ and looks so old ‘[y]ou’d think
he was dead’ – both like Marilyn Monroe (120–1).
Marilyn Monroe has come to represent both of these things.
On the one hand she is the blonde bombshell, a world famous,
glamorous sex symbol, vivacious, irresistible, a fantasy woman.
Mrs Johnstone is flattered to be compared to her by her
husband and the judge and, on stage, the opening glimpse of
Mrs Johnstone often echoes the iconography of Marilyn
Monroe. But on the other hand, however, there is a darker side
to her story. She was also a tragic figure who lived a short and
troubled life, dying at the age of thirty-six from an overdose of
barbiturates in circumstances that are still open to speculation.
Despite her success, she suffered from depression and was
addicted to prescription drugs. Lee Strasberg, her acting tutor
(also famous for teaching The Method School of acting in
America) summed up her contradictory qualities describing
her as having a ‘luminous quality’, a ‘combination of
wistfulness, radiance and yearning’ that made everyone want
to ‘share in the childish naiveté which was at once so shy and

2
A gauze is a transparent curtain sometimes hung at the front of the stage.
When it is lit from the front it is opaque but when it is lit from behind, it
becomes transparent.
 THE PLAY 29

yet so vibrant’ (Strasberg quoted in Harding, 2012, 144). Like

Mickey, her life was shaped by the world she found herself in
and the role she was expected to play and like Mickey, it did
not end well. Mrs Johnstone’s return to Marilyn Monroe in the
final song reflects those dreams that came to nothing.

Guns
Alongside a catapult and two knives, guns and shooting are
liberally littered throughout the play, moving from toys to real
guns in the hands of Sammy and the police. When Mickey first
appears, he has a toy gun and is complaining that Sammy has
stolen his best gun. The first time Sammy appears, he is pointing
a gun at the twins, complaining that it is ‘last’ because it only
fires caps and boasting that he is going to get a real gun (or at
least an air gun). The big gun moment in Act One is the
children’s game where they start with guns and end with
bombs that can ‘destroy ze ’emisphere’ (in reality a condom
full of water) (63). We know this is a game, because the children
tell us and because there are rules; as long as you have your
fingers crossed and you count from one to ten, you can get up
again. It is an innocent game but it prefigures events to come.
When a gun appears again, it is an air pistol in the park. The
guns are starting to get more real and this time it lands them in
trouble with the police. Whilst guns, particularly in Sammy’s
hands, suggest increasing violence and danger, guns in Linda’s
hands have a different connotation. When she is seven, and
one of the lads, she can fire a gun hitting the target. When she
is sixteen and more conscious of being a woman her skill
diminishes and in the funfair she cannot hit anything.
There are two big gun moments in Act Two. The first is the
robbery. This time, as Sammy tells us, ‘it’s not a toy’ and ‘we’re
not playing games. You don’t get up if one of these hits you’,
although he refers to the gun as a shooter as if he is in a film
(118). This gun leaves a man bleeding on the floor. The second
moment uses the same gun retrieved by Mickey from under the
floorboards where Sammy has hidden it. He cannot manage to
shoot Edward and it is only when Mrs Johnstone tells him the
30 BLOOD BROTHERS

truth that as he waves the gun at Edward, it explodes. In

response, the police open fire and four guns kill him. The final
moment happens very quickly and without any words,
underlining the senselessness and waste that guns produce.

Things to do
● Pick out a moment in the play where you feel a character
is entirely responsible for their own actions and write
down your reasons for thinking so. Let a classmate read
what you have written and invite him or her to provide
counter-arguments.
● Twins often feature in stage, television and cinema
productions. Can you think of any examples? How do
they compare to Russell’s presentation of twins?

Character
Mickey
Mickey first appears at the age of seven, knocking incessantly
at his front door, a lively, imaginative and streetwise boy who
knows his mother does not want to see the rent man. He tells
her excitedly about the three thousand dead Indians and why
it was their fault that he had ended up playing by the park. He
is daring. Cutting his hand to swear the oath, he tells Edward,
‘It hurts you know.’ (54). There is a sense of fun, adventure and
mischief about him. With Linda, he encourages Edward to
cheek the policeman when they get caught throwing stones
(although the inference is that neither of them have ever told a
policeman their name was Adolf Hitler). Alongside his energy
and wit, he is also sensitive. He seems close to his mother,
noticing she is happy when they move. Taunted by the gang, he
cries, and he cries several times during the play.
 THE PLAY 31

From the start he is lost and lonely, despite living in a big

family. Left outside to play by himself, he is ‘desultory’ wishing
he was Sammy (50). Later, on a long Sunday afternoon, he
misses Edward and wishes he was more like him. When
Edward does present himself as a friend, Mickey accepts the
friendship quickly and within a short space of time they are
swearing to always stand by each other. During the rest of the
play Mickey is happiest when Edward is there.
As a teenager, Mickey is self-conscious, not confident about
his appearance nor about Linda. Embarrassed by his mother’s
teasing and Linda’s declarations of love, he cannot articulate
his own feelings about her to her face. It is only when he is
alone he can admit that he wants to kiss her and put his arms
around her and ‘even fornicate with y’ ’ (94). But, as his
friendship with Edward is re-born, the old Mickey reappears.
He teases Edward about girlfriends and shamelessly tries to
persuade his mother they are going to see a travelogue about
Sweden. The old gang is back together and the happiest section
of the play shows the summers spent together as they grow
from fourteen to eighteen. Finally, they do all cheek the
policeman with Edward sitting on top of the lamp post and
their time is filled with the fairground, talking the night away
outside the chip shop and taking silly photographs. Mickey’s
fear of asking Linda out is even overcome, with some prompting
from Edward.
This is brought up short as Winter breaks ‘the promise that
Summer had just made’ (110). Torn apart from Edward once
again who is off to university, Mickey is left with a pregnant
girlfriend and a job in a factory making cardboard boxes. He
gets married, loses his job, loses his blood brother and he falls
apart, the promise of the lively seven-year-old lost to the
realities of grown-up life. Edward, protected by money and
university, is still a child, bouncing back home at Christmas
ready for parties and booze. In their penultimate meeting,
Mickey wishes he could still believe in ‘all that blood brother
stuff’ but he cannot ‘because while no one was looking I grew
up’. It was all just ‘kids’ stuff’ (115). All of his hopes and dreams
32 BLOOD BROTHERS

have been taken away from him by life. He agrees to help

Sammy – because he wants to take Linda out dancing for New
Year. In prison, he succumbs to depression and pills, telling
Linda afterwards that he needs them so he can be invisible.
When he fears that Linda, the only thing he thinks he has left,
is being taken away from him, everything unravels and he sets
out to confront Edward. By now, he has stopped taking the
tablets and has begun thinking again. What he sees is very clear
to him, as he asks Edward, ‘how come you got everything . . .
an’ I got nothin’?’ (128). It is a question answered for him by
his mother and Mickey’s final howl of rage – suggests his life
need not have been as it was. It is a plea which begins ‘deep
down inside him’: ‘You! (Screaming) You! Why didn’t you give
me away! (He stands glaring at her, almost uncontrollable with
rage.) I could have been . . . I could have been him!’ (129).

Edward
Edward is Mickey’s opposite. The boys’ sense of this is clear in
‘My Friend’, each wishing they could be more like each other,
conscious that the other is better at things they cannot do (an
idea revisited later in ‘That Guy’). Edward admires Mickey
because he can swear like a soldier and makes him laugh with
his stories and runs around with dirty knees. He appears in
front of Mickey just as he is bemoaning the fact that he is not
more like Sammy, offering Mickey an alternative to his brother.
He is ‘bright and forthcoming’, immediately offering sweets
when asked, suggesting an openness and generosity (51). Later,
he offers to get Mickey cigarettes, gives him the toy gun his
father has bought him and when he comes back from university
to find Mickey has lost his job, he offers him money. Unlike
Mickey’s laughing and swearing, Edward giggles and says
‘super fun’ and ‘smashing’ (52). He is well-mannered, surprising
Mrs Johnstone by asking how she is. ‘I don’t usually have kids
enquiring about my health’, she explains, calling him Master
Lyons (73). He is educated, knows he can look up words in a
 THE PLAY 33

dictionary and goes to a boarding school and later to university.

The play never says which university he goes to, but his teacher
talks of Oxbridge (the entrance examination to go to either
Oxford or Cambridge) and his friends visiting at Christmas
have names like Baz and Ronnie and call him ‘Lyo’ and
‘Lyonese’ suggesting a high-class university. He is, in Sammy’s
words, ‘a friggin’ poshy’, living firstly in a house by the park
and then in the house on the top of the hill (55).
He is also innocent. When Sammy is demanding sweets,
Mickey is urgently suggesting they do not have any. Edward
immediately says that they do and that he has given one to
Mickey for Sammy. He falls for the story about standing up to
the policeman and when Mrs Johnstone says she has been
trying to move for years, he innocently asks, ‘Why don’t you
buy a new house near us?’ (74). Later in the play, he shows his
naivety by asking Mickey why a job is so important. If he
could not get a job, he would ‘draw the dole, live like a
bohemian, tilt my hat to the world and say “screw you” ’, he
tells him (115). He can talk in this way because he is protected
from the real world by his money and, although he is the same
age as Mickey, this has allowed him to remain innocent and
childlike.
Yet, while he is disconnected from the harsh realities of the
world, he can also stand up for himself. When his mother
refuses to let him play with Mickey, he accuses her of not
loving him, saying he prefers Mickey and calling her a ‘fuckoff’
(60). When the teacher demands his locket he refuses suggesting
he should ‘take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut’ and then
refuses to tell his mother who gave it to him. His use of the ‘F
word’ at both these moments suggests the influence of Mickey,
an influence that can also be seen by him smoking after they
come out of the cinema.
Edward does end up, it is suggested, with a good job and as
a local councillor, having enough influence to organize a job
and a house for Mickey. Yet, while he has material possessions,
he is not necessarily happy. His loneliness as a boy is apparent
when he goes to say goodbye to Mrs Johnstone. Crying, he
34 BLOOD BROTHERS

tells her he does not want to go but wants to ‘stay here where
my friends are . . . where Mickey is’ (73). He is no better
equipped at dealing with girls than Mickey and his advice on
what to say to girls is gained from reading books not from his
own experience. He is confined by his mother, his life lacks
warmth, he does not marry the girl he loves and in the end he
is estranged from his best friend.

The narrator
Irving Wardle described the narrator as a ‘satanic figure’ who
punctuates the action ‘with fearful references to lone magpies,
new shoes on the table and the fateful secret known only to the
two women’ (1983). He does seem to be a sinister character,
constantly reminding us that things will not end well and there
is no escape He raises the tension, telling us the devil is closing
in; he is ‘gonna find y–’ (48), he is ‘creeping down the hall’ (48),
he has ‘moved in down the street from you’, maybe ‘even
leanin’ on your door’ (97) until he is right beside you, ‘screamin’
deep inside you’ (126). He is the only unnamed character, the
only one to speak in verse, setting him apart. He stands outside
the action, a brooding presence, eyes like a hawk, watching.
He talks directly to no other character and no-one talks to
him or seems aware of his presence. Dressed in a dark suit
in the stage productions (although this is not indicated in
the play text) gives him a neutral status but also means he is
appropriately dressed for the end, as if he always knows
that the play will end with a funeral. He often helps
orchestrate things on stage, moving props to ensure the show
runs smoothly as if he is in control, arranging what is
happening.
The actor playing the narrator also plays other characters
from the outside world, all of whom bring bad news, as if
the world is conspiring to make life even more difficult. The
milkman tells Mrs Johnstone ‘no money, no milk’ (31). The
gynaecologist tells her she is expecting twins. The bus conductor
 THE PLAY 35

ensures Sammy is handed over to the police. The teachers are

the cause of the twins being suspended. In bringing bad news,
these characters also appear indifferent; ‘it’s got nothin’ to do
with me’ claims the milkman (31).
For all these reasons, it would be simple to read him as a
satanic character as indifferent to the fate of the twins as the
milkman. But while he might remind the characters (and the
audience) that bad things will happen, that ‘a debt is a debt,
and must be paid’, this is different to equating him with the
devil (40). As a character that stands outside of the action,
there is a neutrality about him. He is reminiscent of the chorus
in Ancient Greek tragedies providing background information
to help the audience follow the story and commenting on the
themes and the characters. He fills in moments of action
(‘There’s a man lies bleeding on a garage floor’ (118)) and
keeps us in touch with time passing as the children grow up.
Or he fills in subtext, telling us, for example, what Mrs Lyons
is thinking when Mrs Johnstone tells her she is expecting twins.
In a play that is episodic, he also serves as a linking device that
runs throughout, holding the play together, starting and
finishing it and reminding us that it is a story. He confronts the
audience with questions about the play and characters, making
us think about what is happening, asking us to ‘judge for
ourselves’ how Mrs Johnstone came to be a ‘mother so cruel’
(29). At the end, he frames the key question the play asks: ‘And
do we blame superstition for what came to pass? / Or could it
be what we, the English, have come to know as class?’ (129).
The fact that this question comes from him and that he is an
almost constant presence throughout suggests that he is both
important and serves a more complex function than simply
being the portentous and dark heart of the play.

Mrs Johnstone
The narrator sets up the audience’s expectations of Mrs
Johnstone as a ‘mother so cruel’ with ‘a stone in place of her
36 BLOOD BROTHERS

heart’ (29). Yet this judgement of her seems to be at odds with

the character presented in the play. He does ask the audience
to judge how she came to play this part suggesting that she has
not always been like this but little in her character seems to live
up to this description.
From the start, it is apparent that Mrs Johnstone’s life is
hard. By the time she is twenty-five (and looking much older),
she has seven children and her husband leaves her pregnant
with the twins. There is never enough money. She cannot even
pay the milkman but a hard life has not made her uncaring.
She is presented throughout as a warm, easy going character
with a sense of fun. This is seen, for example, when she
affectionately teases her fourteen-year-old son about being in
love with Linda, joking with him that he has been talking
about her in his sleep. As Linda appears, she continues to tease,
asking if he is waiting for his mother to give him ‘a big sloppy
kiss’ (85). Her natural ebullience and optimism bubbles over
when she finds they are moving and she always seems to make
the best of things. Even when the new house does not solve all
of her problems, she stays positive. The neighbours might fight
on Saturday night but ‘never in the week’ (82). There is a
softness about her, especially in relation to her children. She
makes excuses for Sammy burning down the school. She
cannot part with Edward without giving him the locket as a
memento.
There is a marked contrast between her and Mrs Lyons in
relation to their children. When Mrs Lyons teaches Edward to
dance she is clinging, fussy and holds onto him, asking him for
reassurance. In contrast, when the boys try to hide from Mrs
Johnstone which film they are going to see, she is much more
relaxed and broadminded, joking with them, leading Edward
to tell Mickey, ‘She’s fabulous your ma, isn’t she?’ (99). Despite
all her good humour, she is not always very responsible. Glen
Walford describes her as being ‘a fantasist’ who does not live
in the real world. She buys things on credit, overwhelmed by
how nice things look in the shop, even though she knows she
does not have the money to pay for them. Within two pages of
 THE PLAY 37

having had her wireless repossessed, she is promising her

fretful children that they can look in the catalogue the following
week for a bicycle.
Such childish behaviour is at odds with her role in the play as
a mother (in the original version of the show, the character –
was simply called The Mother). Whilst Mrs Lyons cannot have
children, she ‘can’t stop havin’ them’ (33). Despite having so
many children she ‘loves the bones of every one of them’ and
despite her childishness, she is also a character who changes
during the play (9). In her final confrontation with Mrs Lyons,
she refuses to take the money having learned that she would
only buy more stuff with it. Instead, she wants to keep the life
she has made out in the country. ‘It’s not much of one,’ she tells
the irate Mrs Lyons, ‘but I made it. I’m stayin’ here. You move if
you want to’ (101).
She could be seen as a cruel mother because she gives away
her baby but her reasons seem to be unselfish. She is moved by
Mrs Lyons’ desperate need for a child and by the thought that
her child will have a better life, and she is scared of The Welfare
who are already threatening to take her children away. Her
distress at giving one twin away when Mrs Lyons arrives to
collect the baby is apparent; she begs for a few more days with
both of them and then cannot bear to hear which one is being
taken. ‘Don’t tell me which one’, she says to Mrs Lyons. ‘Just
take him, take him’ (43). She tries to stick by the agreement
and keep the twins apart but cannot and, finally, does not stop
the boys becoming friends. At the end, she frantically rushes to
the Town Hall to try and stop Mickey, the end being more
tragic because of our sympathy for Mrs Johnstone.

Mrs Lyons
Mrs Lyons is presented as the opposite of Mrs Johnstone.
While Mrs Johnstone cannot stop getting pregnant and lives
surrounded by the affectionate squabbling of her children, Mrs
Lyons lives by herself in a large house while her husband is
38 BLOOD BROTHERS

away working. She is unable to have children of her own. And

there is much that might point to Mrs Lyons being the villain.
One of the first things she does is to put her new shoes on the
table, breaking a superstition and starting a train of events
which ends with the death of the twins. She persuades Mrs
Johnstone to allow her to have one of the twins, exploiting
Mrs Johnstone’s poverty to get what she wants. She is very
much in control at the outset, issuing commands, like ‘they
shall be raised apart and never, ever told what was once the
truth’ and expecting to be obeyed (47). She is also manipulative.
Exploiting the fact that she knows Mrs Johnstone is
superstitious, she fabricates the story of separated twins dying
if they find out the truth and she shows she has no concern for
the feelings of others. Having promised Mrs Johnstone she will
be able to see her son every day at work, she very soon
afterwards sacks her. She also lies to her husband about why
she wants to get rid of Mrs Johnstone and deceives him into
thinking it is his child.
As the play progresses, she becomes increasingly fearful that
the truth will surface and she will lose Edward, persuading her
husband that they have to move. She is possessive and over-
protective of Edward, not wanting him to play out and she
becomes insecure, seeking reassurance from Edward that they
have had a good time in the holidays. Gradually she becomes
more and more paranoid, convinced that Mrs Johnstone is
following her, convinced that she has given Edward the locket
so he will not forget her. In the end, she firmly believes that
Mrs Johnstone has ruined her. While she starts by believing an
adopted child can ‘become one’s own’, by the end she is sure
that when Edward was a tiny baby ‘I’d see him looking straight
at me and I’d think, he knows’ (33; 100). She tries to buy off
Mrs Johnstone again, offering her money to move away, and
when she refuses, Mrs Lyons lunges at her with a kitchen knife
cursing her and calling her a witch. In reality, it is Mrs Lyons
who becomes the witch, a madwoman living on the hill scaring
children, their chant (coming from off-stage) sounding as if it
is echoing in her own head. Her final appearance is to show
 THE PLAY 39

Mickey that Linda and Edward are together. She says nothing,
just points out what is happening to him, a broken woman,
beyond speech.
Whilst there is a lot of evidence in the play that she is a ‘bad’
character there is also more to her character. In the scene where
she persuades Mrs Johnstone to give her the baby, there is a
very different Mrs Lyons. She is lonely. She has wanted to
adopt a child but is prevented by Mr Lyons who wants his own
son. When she hatches her plan to take one of the twins, she is
excited and happy, believing she is helping Mrs Johnstone out.
‘It’s mad,’ she tells Mrs Johnstone, ‘. . . but it’s wonderful, it’s
perfect’ (36). The song, ‘My Child’ shows her real loneliness
and her dream of having a child, a child she promises Mrs
Johnstone that she will look after, giving him toys to play with
and a bed of his own. She promises that in the end he ‘could
never be told / To stand and queue up / For hours on end at the
dole’ (38). She promises, too, more than material things; she
will keep him warm in winter and cool in summer, always
there if his dream is a nightmare. Whilst there is little real
affection shown between her and Edward (and where there is,
it is always too cloying and too needy), she does ensure he goes
to a good school and has the chance to go to university. It is at
the end of her song, when Mrs Johnstone sees the room Mrs
Lyons is standing in, looking in ‘awe at the comparative
opulence and ease of the place’ but also when she hears Mrs
Lyons’ desperation, that Mrs Johnstone turns to her and agrees
(37). From this perspective, it is possible to see a very different
Mrs Lyons whose fear and obsession stems from a very real
terror of losing her child. She believes what she is doing is ‘for
your own good. It’s only because I love you Edward’ (60).
Even when she reaches for the knife to stab Mrs Johnstone it is
not something she has thought about before but a last resort,
an impulse as the stage directions tell us, when her attempt to
payoff Mrs Johnstone again has failed. From this we can see a
much more complex character emerge who moves beyond
being a pantomime villain, telling a tragic story of love that
goes wrong.
40 BLOOD BROTHERS

Linda
Linda first appears in the scene where the children are fighting
battles and the first thing she does is to stand up to Sammy and
defeat him, stopping his shots with a bin lid. At the end of the
song, when the children, led by Sammy, are accusing Mickey of
lying and saying he will fry in hell like a fish in a chip shop fat
only five million times hotter, Linda ‘moves in to protect’ him
(64). She stands up to Sammy, undaunted, forcing him to beat
a hasty withdrawal with his gang and then comforts Mickey,
drying his tears and cheering him up. From this early scene, we
learn two important things about Linda; she is brave and takes
charge of things and she stands by Mickey, protecting him. In
the early scenes, she is an equal to the boys, if not better. She
hits the target when they go shooting (whereas both Edward
and Mickey miss) and she joins in the joke about cheeking the
policeman. Later in the play, we also see some more of her
good-natured humour as she jokes with Edward: ‘Well, hello
sweetie pie; looking for a good time? Ten to seven (She laughs).
Good time . . . ten to seven . . .’ (106). As a young girl, she is
very much one of the boys and one of the gang.
As they grow up and turn fourteen, she is still part of the
gang, but inevitably relationships change. Sexual tensions start
to emerge, at one point highlighted by Linda being caught in the
centre of a game of piggy-in-the-middle played with a coconut.
She still constantly sticks up for Mickey (when the bus conductor
asks how old he is, it is Linda who answers for him and later
when the teacher turns on him, she tells him to leave Mickey
alone), showing her support for him but now she starts to talk
about loving him, much to Mickey’s embarrassment. She pursues
her love over the next four years, declaring her love at every
opportunity, even in front of 500 people in assembly. For one so
proactive in so many other ways, she plays a very traditional role
in not being able to initiate the relationship herself. In the end, it
is Edward who finally makes Mickey ask her out.
From here, things move quickly. Linda gets pregnant and
they marry but there is no fairy tale happy ever after. She
 THE PLAY 41

becomes a housewife looking after her husband and child.

Through everything that happens to Mickey, Linda is still
strong and loyal. She visits him in prison, tries to persuade him
to stop taking the drugs (she says she is depressed too but does
not turn to pills to help) and, with Edward’s help, sorts out a
house and a job for him. She still needs and loves Mickey but
when he will not stop taking the tablets, she gets frustrated.
‘What about what I need?’ she asks him. ‘I need you. I love
you. But, Mickey, not when you’ve got them inside you. When
you take those things, Mickey, I can’t even see you’ (123). His
answer is to take his work bag from her and grab his tablets.
In response she turns to Edward. She still has a glimmer
inside her of the girl she used to be before she ‘washed a million
dishes’ and it is in trying to get back some of who she used to be
that she hesitantly goes to meet Edward (123). When they meet,
they re-enact a moment from their childhood; Edward mimes
firing a gun and it is in the laughter following this game that
they kiss. He is the reminder of the ‘half remembered song’ of
her childhood (123). Russell is at pains to point out that what
happens between them is not meant to be cruel. They are ‘two
fools’ who ‘grasp at half a chance’ (124). But as Mrs Johnstone
sings ‘Light Romance’ to the same tune as ‘Easy Terms’, there is
a clear feeling that a price will have to be paid, which is echoed
in the image of Mickey hammering on the door ‘calling for
Linda, as he once did for his mother’ (125). At the end, she can
only run down the aisle, arriving as the twins lie dead, no longer
able, as she was as a child, to protect Mickey.

Sammy
We hear about Sammy from Mickey before we see him. Firstly,
Mickey wishes he was Sammy, despite the fact that he stole his
toy car and broke it. Mickey sees his older brother as everything
that is exciting, able to do daring things like drawing nudey
women and weeing through the letter box. Secondly, Mickey
tells Edward about Sammy. He hopes he is in a good mood
because he can be ‘dead mean sometimes’ but even more
42 BLOOD BROTHERS

excitingly, he has a plate in his head from where his sister,

Donna Marie, dropped him out of the window (53). When he
does appear, he leaps out in front of the twins, gun in hand,
demanding a sweet. From here, Sammy is always associated
with guns (and a catapult), the nature of the guns changing
through the play from a toy to a real gun. It is this association
and his role in the garage shooting, which can characterize
Sammy as a ‘bad boy’. He is also seen pulling a knife on the
bus conductor and we hear that he has burned the school
down when the family move. He is clearly a boy who is out of
control and there is a fatalistic inevitability in his journey
through the play, which leaves him in prison at the end.
Yet, Sammy is also a likeable character. As we have seen from
Mickey’s admiration of his older brother, there is more to him
than guns and stealing and Mickey is not the only one to look
up to him. He is the leader of the gang and the leader in the
imaginative game played by the children, always raising the
stakes from gun to bazooka to atom bomb. He may have killed
the worms in his pocket (again) but he does want to give them
a decent burial and seems genuinely perplexed that they keep
dying. One of the things that engenders our sympathy is the fact
that there seems to be no hope for him, no way that his life
would (or could) have turned out differently, that he is let down
by the world he finds himself in. The sympathy is created by
these first scenes where we see a lively, charismatic boy who
ends up on the dole at sixteen, with little hope. This is not
presented as an excuse for his progression to armed robbery but
the implied criticism seems to be of a world that does not make
use of his energy and imagination and instead stifles it, as we see
the teacher stifling Mickey in the school scene. Sammy is not
simply aggressive he is also, in Linda’s words, ‘a soft get’ (87).

Mr Lyons
Fathers are very absent in Blood Brothers, the twins’ father
appearing only briefly in the opening song. The strongest image
 THE PLAY 43

of a father (and a husband) comes in Mr Lyons who appears

after the birth of the twins, his absence working away from
home allowing for Mrs Lyons’ deception. When we first meet
him, he appears proud of his wife and child and good natured
but he is also rather distant. He is happy to leave his wife in
charge of bringing up Edward and domestic arrangements,
telling her ‘you know best’ (45). Although he shows concern
about his wife’s depression and acquiesces to her demands to
move, he never really seems to understand or take her problems
seriously, suggesting that she should see someone else (the
doctor) to solve her problems. His main contribution to
bringing up Edward is the provision of money, nice homes and
an expensive education. Whilst he has one moment when he
buys Edward a toy gun, spiritedly dying for him as they romp
on the floor (an interesting moment to compare with Mickey
‘shooting’ his mother on page 49), he soon has to go, leaving
Mrs Lyons to finish the story with their son.
Always in a hurry, constantly looking at his watch or
impatiently blowing the car horn, his mind is elsewhere,
needing to get to work. He tells his wife that when the merger
is completed, ‘the firm will run itself and I’ll have plenty of
time to spend with you both’ (58). Instead, he all but disappears
in Act Two. His final contribution is sacking Mickey, amongst
others in his workforce who are ‘surplus to requirement’,
reinforcing his indifference to the lives of people, and leaving
the two mothers at the heart of the play (111). When the twins
die, he and his wife are absent.

Things to do
● Write diaries for both Mickey and Edward, describing their
first meeting. Think carefully about your written
expression and make sure it is appropriate for each
character. You could extend this by writing about other
key moments in their relationship (for example about
44 BLOOD BROTHERS

being in trouble with the policeman, moving to the

country or their thoughts about Linda).
● Writing in the format of a play script, imagine the initial
meeting between a director and an actor who has been
cast in one of the main roles of Blood Brothers. Include the
questions you think an actor might have and try to show the
director’s interpretation of the role through his/her answers.

Dramatic technique
When looking to describe a play, parallels with other works
can help to understand what we are seeing. Care does need to
be taken though and one of the temptations with Blood
Brothers is to draw links with any other story that makes use
of twins separated at birth. Most commonly, people look to
Alexander Dumas’ The Corsican Brothers (1844) but the story
is very different (the twins in this story know they are twins
and can feel each other’s pain). Russell has said that although
his story feels ‘as if it’s a story that has always existed’, there is
no existing story as far as he knows that parallels his one
(Mulligan, 2005). But some comparisons do help locate the
play in a wider framework and an understanding of these can
help shed light on the play. Critics writing about Blood Brothers
have chosen to describe it in a number of ways including:

Greek tragedy
Brechtian
Melodrama

Greek tragedy
The key ideas of Greek tragedy were laid out by Aristotle in
the Poetics (335 BCE ). These included:
 THE PLAY 45

● Tragedy depicts the downfall of a hero through a

combination of hubris (human frailty or flaws)
with the will of the gods.
● The hero has a flaw and/or makes a mistake
(hamartia).
● There is a revelation (anagnorisis) or what Aristotle
defined as ‘a change from ignorance to awareness’
(Aristotle, 1998, 15).
● Tragedy has the most effect on an audience when it is
one family member who harms another.

The freelance director and former head of New Writing at

the National Theatre, John Burgess, suggests tragedy is
something which looks at the relationship between:
● Man and his own death and other men
● Man and gods and things that don’t change
● Man and passions that live inside him.
BURGESS, 2005, xiii
It is possible to see some of these ideas at work in Blood
Brothers. Mrs Johnstone’s downfall, her path from happiness
to misery, is the result of an error, i.e. giving away one of the
twins. This is combined with her belief in superstition, which
can be seen as a version of the gods. At the end, Mickey finds
out the truth. There is a revelation, a change from ignorance of
who Edward is to awareness that he is his twin and a realization
he could have been him. The impact of Mrs Johnstone losing
two of her children heightens our emotional response to the
play because they are family. Connections to Greek tragedy
can also be seen through the use of the narrator as a chorus
(see ‘Character’ section) and another reason critics see echoes
of Greek tragedy in the play is through Willy Russell’s use of
superstition or myths, in particular Mrs Lyons’ story which
feels like it should be an age-old tale.
46 BLOOD BROTHERS

Fate (or the will of the gods) which was also important in
Greek tragedy is a difficult idea in the twenty-first century. We
like to think that as individuals we are in control of our own
destiny and the idea of things being predetermined can feel
alien. Another way of thinking about fate might help think
about how things work out in Blood Brothers. The characters
are responsible for actions (i.e. they make choices) but there
are forces outside of them (class and society) that are bigger
than they are and mean they are not totally in control. For
example, Mickey’s decision to go on a job with Sammy comes
about because he has lost his job through no fault of his own.
One reason it could be argued that Blood Brothers is not
like a Greek tragedy is that Aristotle also said that tragedy
should deal with characters of a ‘high degree and reputation’
(i.e. kings or noblemen) and the characters in Blood Brothers
are ordinary people (Aristotle, 1998, 17). However, the
American playwright Arthur Miller (1915–2005), in an essay
called ‘Tragedy and the Common Man’ written in 1949, argued
that ‘the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its
highest sense as kings were’ and that ‘insistence upon the rank
of the tragic hero [. . .] is really but a clinging to the outward
forms of tragedy’ (Miller, 1977, 3; 5). In reviewing the play
Logan argues Blood Brothers does attain Greek proportions
‘while mocking the old argument – substantiated with reference
to the Greeks – that low-status characters can’t be tragic.
Mickey Johnstone’s class is his tragedy’ (1998).

Brecht and epic theatre

Brecht was critical of naturalistic or, what he called, dramatic
theatre. He believed that in this kind of theatre, the audience
forgets their own lives and escapes into the lives of others,
losing their ability to think. They hung ‘up their brains with
their hats in the cloakroom’ and it ‘drugged’ the audience,
rather like the tablets stop Mickey thinking (Brecht, 1986, 27).
In its place he wanted a theatre that made his audience think,
 THE PLAY 47

which he called epic theatre, and in order to prevent the

audience from becoming too involved he reminded them
throughout that they were watching a representation of life, not
real life itself. He called the act of distancing the audience from
emotional involvement (or empathy) the verfremdungseffekt
(sometimes called the alienation effect but maybe better
translated as making the familiar strange). To achieve this he
used a number of theatrical devices and some of these can be
seen in Blood Brothers, especially in the use of the narrator. For
Brecht, epic theatre ‘began to tell a story’ from which the
narrator was no longer missing and narration is used to remind
the audience that they are watching the presentation of that
story (Brecht, 1986, 71). Sometimes the narrator will tell the
audience what happens before an audience sees it, which can
help to ensure that they are less emotionally involved in the
action as the outcome is already known (think about reading a
story for the second time). Blood Brothers uses both a narrator
and tells us at the start what will happen, so we become more
interested in how it happens rather than what happens.
The narrator also speaks directly to the audience, breaking
the fourth wall. In naturalistic theatre, the actor behaves as if
they were the character and the audience was not present,
adding to the illusion that this is reality. When the narrator
asks us to judge how Mrs Johnstone has become a mother so
cruel, he is not only asking us to think and make our minds up
about something, he is also reminding us that we are watching
a story. The narrator plays a number of different parts and at
one moment the play even draws attention to this as Mrs
Johnstone asks the narrator who appears as the gynaecologist
(having just previously played the milkman), what he is doing
there because the milk bill is not due until Thursday. Some of
the cast also play multiple roles from children to people in the
dole queue. For an audience, seeing the same actor play a
number of roles reminds them that they are watching an actor,
to use Brecht’s word, demonstrating a character.
Brecht wanted sets that would suggest the world rather
than represent it, ‘a place need only have the credibility of a
48 BLOOD BROTHERS

place glimpsed in a dream’ (Brecht, 1986, 23). Blood Brothers

moves through a number of locations, so the set can only be
suggestive of places and sometimes characters move to new
places very quickly (see ‘Set’ section). Brecht also used music to
break up the action and comment on scenes, drawing attention
to the theatricality by having the orchestra on the stage (as it
was in the first production of Blood Brothers) and using
different lighting for the songs. Blood Brothers does not use
music to comment in the same way as Brecht, but the songs
still remind us that this is theatre in the same way as some
people say they do not like musicals because it is not realistic
when people suddenly burst into song walking down the street.
One thing could be held up to say that Blood Brothers does
not conform to Brechtian ideas of theatre – the emotional
impact or connection we may feel to the story and the
characters. Many people think Brecht wanted the audience to
feel no emotion or empathy with what was happening on stage.
In fact, what Brecht was wary of was the audience having
similar emotions to the characters, believing this reinforced our
conviction that these feelings were normal. Brecht said that
‘when something seems “the most obvious thing in the world”
it means that any attempt to understand the world has been
given up’ (Brecht, 1986, 71). Instead, he wanted the audience
to ask if these experiences were indeed normal and if so whether
they should be. He certainly was not against emotion saying
that it simply was not true that epic theatre ‘proclaims the
slogan: “Reason this side, Emotion (feeling) that.” It by no
means renounces emotion’ (Brecht, 1986, 227). So, if you find
yourself reaching for the tissues as you leave the theatre as well
as asking how a tragedy like Blood Brothers can happen, then
you could argue you have just seen a piece of Brechtian theatre.

Melodrama
The word melodrama today tends to be used as a dismissive
term for work that is heightened and simplistic and many of
 THE PLAY 49

the critics that refer to Blood Brothers as a melodrama use it

as a term of criticism. Brian Logan, for example, suggests
the play is ‘melodramatic’ and ‘over-insistent’, criticising its
simplicity (1998).
Melodrama was a popular nineteenth-century theatrical
form associated with sensational events, exaggerated emotions
and a simplified moral universe, where good was always good
and bad was always bad. It included the use of music (melos
means song or melody), often to signify character, and used
stereotypical or stock characters. The heroine was always
beautiful, morally upright and underwent a series of trials at
the hands of the villain from which she was rescued by the
handsome hero (usually with the help of his friend because
the hero was not always very bright). They ended happily with
the villain punished, or dead, and the couple united. From this
description, it can be seen that Blood Brothers is very different
to a melodrama with more complexity of character and plot
(as well as not having a happy ending), although it is possible
to see some connections. Some critics argue that aspects of the
play are over-simplified. Brian Logan continues by saying the
‘dice [. . .] are loaded against the well-to-do [the Lyons], and
our sympathies are frog-marched towards the underdog [the
Johnstones]’, arguing that the parts for the Lyons ‘are
unsympathetically written’ (Logan, 1998). The heightened
emotions, especially in the final song, and what could be
argued is a simplified argument about class could help to see
Blood Brothers as having melodramatic aspects which, in
contrast to the Brechtian aspects of the play, overwhelm our
senses and by-pass our critical facilities.

Music and song

In a musical, songs do not exist to entertain, like a pop song.
They are there to communicate the drama and musicals contain
different kinds of songs to do different things. Some carry the
plot forward, filling in gaps in the story (often known as
50 BLOOD BROTHERS

narrative or action songs), some develop character, some reflect

on themes. Songs also highlight emotion and evoke atmosphere
and mood and they also serve to extend a moment. Saying
‘I love you’ takes a few seconds but Edward singing ‘I’m Not
Saying a Word’ expands and repeats the idea giving it greater
resonance. Many of the songs in the show are repeated also
helping to create a sense of unity.

Narrative songs
The main narrative song is ‘Marilyn Monroe’, although it also
serves thematically to create the connections between the film
star and the characters of Mrs Johnstone and Mickey and in
this sense also serves as a character song. It appears three times
in the show, at the start of Act One and Act Two and it
reappears when Mickey is in prison. Some narrative is also
borne by the narrator’s songs and ‘One Summer’ condenses
four years into three pages.

Character songs
The twins share two songs, ‘Lonely Sunday Afternoon / My
Friend’ and ‘That Guy’ which, whilst singing about their
differences, establishes the connections between them. There is
a lot to be learned about Mrs Lyons from her duet with Mrs
Johnstone and whilst Mrs Johnstone’s theme is about making
a decision, Mrs Lyons’ section of the song reveals her loneliness
and her desire for a child of her own. All three songs are duets,
bringing together characters who are separated in the play,
finding some harmony between them.
Mrs Johnstone has two songs that reveal her character.
‘Bright New Day’, the most upbeat song in the show, reflects
her optimistic nature and her dreams of escaping. ‘Tell Me It’s
Not True’ underlines her inability to accept what has happened
and her desperation at the death of the twins. As the final song
in the play, it also provides the emotional climax to the story,
starting with the plaintive, imploring voice of Mrs Johnstone
singing alone and building into a finale sung by the whole
company, growing in volume and power.
 THE PLAY 51

Edward’s love song is also a character song, showing that

like Mickey, he is unable to talk about his feelings but he can
sing about them and even then he keeps saying that is not
really what he is saying. ‘If I was him,’ he insists, ‘I’d bring you
flowers / and ask you to dance.’ But because he is not him, he ‘is
not saying a word’ (108). This kind of song is known as a
conditional love song in musicals. As with the two duets, it
also shows Edward wishing he could be in Mickey’s shoes and
the simplicity of the tune reflects Edward’s immature character.

Thematic songs
The song which carries the most thematic resonance is ‘Easy
Terms’. At the start, it appears to be a straightforward song
about Mrs Johnstone’s things being repossessed. They have
only been hers on borrowed time. But as she stands there with
the twins in the pram, it becomes a song about losing one of
them. ‘Easy terms’ might be a phrase associated with paying
for something in instalments (as is the never never, when
something is never paid for) but it is also a term for being close
to someone. As she moves through the song, the focus changes
and the third verse is clearly about losing one of the babies.
This sense of loss is emphasized when a verse of the song recurs
later in the play as Mrs Johnstone sends Edward away. The
song also highlights the themes of the price to be paid and fear
about who might be at the door and when the tune reappears
as ‘Light Romance’, it alerts the audience to the fact that there
will be a price to be paid for Linda and Edward’s actions.

Mood songs
The show starts with an overture, a melancholic, hymn like
vocal with no words out of which comes the yearning voice of
Mrs Johnstone singing ‘Tell me it’s not true / Say it’s just story’
(29). This sets the mood before a word has been spoken. Much
of the mood after this is created by the narrator’s song which
reappears several times with its driving rhythm suggesting
nothing will be able to stop it, just as no-one will be able to
stop the inevitable ending, adding a seam of tension and
52 BLOOD BROTHERS

menace. One musical influence on Willy Russell is traditional

ballads, in particular the Child Ballads, a collection of fifteenth-
and sixteenth-century songs made by Francis Child. Despite
their name, they are not children’s songs but often dark stories
of murder or the supernatural (not the slow and romantic
songs we tend to associate with the term today) and the
narrator’s song is a good example of this influence and, in fact,
the whole show has the structure and feel of a ballad.
Music in the play also serves to underscore moments
creating mood. Irving Wardle suggests the most ‘telling
moments are sustained beds of sound underlying the dialogue’
projecting the desolation of a lonely Sunday or the dark-side of
children’s games’ (1983). Sound effects (usually played by the
band) also help underline moments. Not many are indicated in
the text suggesting the importance of those that are specified.
At the moment Mrs Johnstone lays her hand on the Bible to
swear she will not tell anyone the truth, there is ‘a bass note,
repeated as a heartbeat’ (39). This runs through the ensuing
scene, growing in intensity, as the narrator reminds the
audience that ‘the pact is sealed’ and ‘a deal has been done’. It
reaches its climax as he ends on a ‘debt is a debt and must be
paid’ underlining the importance of the section, but it is then
replaced by the sound of crying babies helping to reinforce
tension but also reminding us of the impending birth of the
babies and the moment when the promise will have to be
kept (40).
Two songs are harder to categorize. ‘The Kids Song’ sets up
a world of children playing on the streets, introducing guns
and killing. Musically, it sounds as though it could be being
played on the street by banging bin lids together, as the
percussion underscores a world of imaginative games. It is the
kind of song in musicals often called ‘the ordinary world’ song
serving to create the everyday life that the play is set in. The
Lyons’ world, in contrast, does not have its own song. The
other song that is hard to categorize is ‘Take a Letter Mrs
Jones’. It is the song that is most about the context of the show,
reflecting on the impact of unemployment and musically it has
 THE PLAY 53

echoes of 2Tone, a musical form popular in the early eighties

with its use of brass instruments. It also moves the story along
by showing the wedding and Mickey losing his job, and being
sung by Mr Lyons it tells something about his character. His
clipped vocal style and refined accent create a sense of not
caring about the impact of what he is doing (dictating
redundancy letters) and combined with the lyrics which are
emotionless (it is just another sign of the times, he tells Mrs
Jones before he sacks her too) create an image of an unfeeling
man while we watch the human impact of his actions as the
dole queue lengthens.
To understand how the music works in the play, you need to
listen to the songs. All the text gives you are the lyrics but the
real meaning is made not just by the words on the page. The
style of the music and how the singer/actor delivers the song,
also add to the meaning. Writing about music is difficult but
you do not need to have a very detailed knowledge of music to
see some of the implications in performance. For example,
compare the versions of ‘Marilyn Monroe’ from Barbara
Dickson’s original recording with Kiki Dee’s version. The
former starts with a cheerful introduction and is more upbeat,
only slowing down when she sings about looking forty-two,
giving a sense of someone living through a good time when she
was young. The version by Kiki Dee is much slower and more
wistful, as if she is looking back on being young and happy
rather than living it.

Set
At the start of the play, the production note offers some advice
on the setting saying ‘the whole play should flow along easily
and smoothly with no cumbersome scene changes’. The only
semi-permanent areas are the Lyons’ comfortable home and
the exterior front door of the Johnstone’s house. The area
between the two houses acts as ‘communal ground’ for street
scenes. Apart from this note there is little description of the set
54 BLOOD BROTHERS

in the play although it contains a large number of different

settings including:

● The Lyons’ lounge

● The Johnstone’s terraced house
● Their new houses in the country (including Mrs
Johnstone’s kitchen)
● The street
● The gynaecologist’s office
● The park
● The Lyons’ garden
● The bus stop and the bus
● Two schools
● The hill above the estate
● The street outside the cinema
● The funfair
● Prison
● Mickey and Linda’s house
● The Town Hall

The action moves very quickly between these different places

(for example, it goes from Mickey’s school to Mrs Lyons’
house to the hill above the estate in three pages) and a simple
staging means the play can keep moving without pauses or
blackouts, allowing for a sense of continuity in the story and
giving a sense of relentlessly moving forwards towards the
conclusion.
Sometimes the text itself helps us to understand where we
are. When Mickey asks Edward to come to the park he is in the
garden. We recognize this when Mickey encourages him to
 THE PLAY 55

‘bunk under y’fence’ (67). We realize Mickey and Linda are

climbing a hill outside the estate because Linda complains
about her high heels sinking into the ground and having to
walk over a load of fields and we know they are on a hill when
Mickey says ‘y’can see the estate from up here’ (93). But, given
the lack of precise set description in the text, much of the set
we associate with the play has come from decisions that
designers have made based on the production notes and the
demands of the script. The ‘semi-permanent’ setting used for
many productions depicts the Lyons’ lounge on one side of the
stage using some of the clues in the text about what needs to
be in this room (a table where the shoes get put, a shelf of
books where the dictionary is kept) alongside indications of
the Lyons’ class. This contrasts with the opposite side of the
stage where a line of terraced houses with peeling paint, fading
graffiti and milk bottles on the step includes Mrs Johnstone’s
front door. These houses are not complete facades but stop
halfway up helping to keep in mind that this is not real. Its
proximity to the Lyons’ house, of which we see only one room
suggesting a much bigger house, maintains the contrast of the
two lives throughout the play. At the back a grey skyline of
Liverpool dominates Act One (changing to the countryside in
Act Two), helping to locate the play in the city. Sometimes
small pieces of set are used to suggest a location. The bus is a
line of scruffy bench seats and a steering wheel. The school is
a few desks and the funfair is flashing neon signs with the
shapes of rides appearing above the houses. At other times, the
set is flown in to define a space for the prison or the Town Hall.
All of this is suggestive of a world rather than a realistic
representation.
The non-naturalistic set not only maintains the theatricality
of the play but also allows for non-naturalistic (or over-lapping)
staging. At times, characters appear on stage when they are not
part of the scene and this can add to their character. For example,
Edward watches unnoticed as the children play, supposedly in
his garden, suggesting his loneliness and later, when he has
moved to the country and Mickey is bored and lonely, he
56 BLOOD BROTHERS

appears in his own garden ‘equally bored and alone’ suggesting

a connection between the twins (77). The stage directions tell us
this might just be in Mickey’s imagination. The space occupied
by Eddie and Mickey most of the time is the space between the
houses, an empty space, emphasizing the way they are caught
between two worlds and trying to find a way of meeting on
neutral ground. So, the set can operate in a way that is not
always literal but helps develop the sub text.

Costume
As with the set, there is little indication in the text for costume
but in the production it works to help establish class and also
the time period. For example, Sammy as a sixteen-year-old
appears in a black leather jacket with ‘Status Quo’ (a rock band
that were popular in the 1970s) on the back, with the jacket
also indicating that he is a bit of a tearaway. A comparison of
Mrs Johnstone’s and Mrs Lyons’ costumes helps to show how
costume indicates class. Apart from a brief glimpse of Mrs
Johnstone at the start as a carefree young girl in a fifties-style
dress and looking a little like Marilyn Monroe, she wears
wraparound sleeveless aprons to cover her slightly dowdy
catalogue clothing. This suggests someone who is always
working, either at her cleaning job or as a mother looking after
her children. In contrast, Mrs Lyons is immaculately dressed,
with jewelry and high heels. When she first appears she has
been shopping and she appears in a variety of different costumes
throughout, suggesting she has a large wardrobe.
The twins’ costumes also show the class differences between
them. Mickey at seven is ragged and dirty, with tousled hair,
falling down socks and a too big hand-me-down jumper which
is out of shape, often pulled down over his knees or over his
head. As he grows up, his shorts are swapped for jeans and a
school blazer with a carelessly knotted tie. Later the blazer is
replaced with a parka and then a donkey jacket symbolizing
someone who is a manual worker. Edward is always neat, tidy
 THE PLAY 57

and well ironed with well-cut and shining hair. The grey shorts
and tidily pulled up socks he wears at seven become firstly grey
flannel trousers (matched with a smart public school blazer),
later corduroys (paired with a duffel coat and college scarf)
and eventually a suit as he mirrors the costume Mr Lyons
wears.

Language
Like his home city which is renowned for the pleasure it takes
in language and story-telling, Willy Russell likes ‘to revel in the
language’ and the play makes use of the words, phrases and
accents of Liverpool (Gill, 1992, 1–2). It is the Johnstone
family who speak with the broadest accents and use the most
colloquial language. People are dead mean, dead careful, dead
funny or dead worried, where dead means very, rather than
deceased. People are referred to as ‘Our Sammy’ or ‘me
husband’, greeted by Hi-yas and waved off with Ta-ras. All of
these phrases bring a flavour of the language of the city to the
stage. ‘All youse lot swear’, Linda says to the gang and swear
words also pepper the Johnstone children’s language (64).
Edward’s delight at learning to swear is one of the things that
brings the twins together. However, he never sounds quite right
when he swears making Mickey laugh because ‘it sounds dead
funny swearin’ in that posh voice’ (95). When Edward tells his
mother she is ‘a fuckoff’, his misuse of the word adds to the
sense that it is not his natural idiom (60).
Instead of swearing or using colloquialisms, Edward uses
words like ‘super fun’ and ‘smashing’ and, like his parents,
does not have a Liverpool accent. A strong Liverpool accent
here is used to denote class, a point also made by the use of the
twins’ names. No one calls Mickey, Michael and it is Mickey
who calls Edward, Eddie. The Lyons’ refer to their son by
his full name and use formal language and old fashioned
phrases, Mr Lyons referring to his son as ‘old chap’ (72). The
differences can also be seen in the words the boys use for their
58 BLOOD BROTHERS

mothers. To Mickey, Mrs Johnstone is usually ‘Mam’ (a term

common in Liverpool) and occasionally ‘Mother’. Edward
uses ‘Mummy’ and occasionally ‘My Ma’. The first meeting of
the twins is also a good illustration of the differences in the use
and understanding of language. Mickey whispers ‘the ‘F’ word’
in Edward’s ear. Then Edward turns to him to ask what it
means.

Mickey I don’t know. It sounds good though doesn’t it?

Edward Fantastic. When I get home I’ll look it up in the
dictionary.
Mickey In the what?
Edward The dictionary. Don’t you know what a dictionary
is?
Mickey ’Course I do . . . It’s a, it’s a thingy innit?
Edward A book which explains the meaning of words.
Mickey The meaning of words, yeh. (53)

Edward’s instinct is to find out the meaning of words in a

book. Mickey is not convinced by Edward’s explanation of
what a dictionary is and revels more in his pleasure at the
sound of the language. He likes words because they sound
good.
Language also helps to define characters and highlight
themes. Mrs Lyons’ language changes through the play from
being confident and authoritarian to desperate and emotive as
she descends into madness, using language which makes the
listener feel more intensely (as opposed to emotional language
which is characterized by intense feeling in the way that it is
said). The narrator’s language is poetic and old-fashioned, at
times emphasizing the timelessness of the story and suggesting
its locations in the past and in myth, making him seem less
realistic and emphasizing his authority and wisdom. The play
also uses a lot of repetition. Phrases like ‘the devil’s got your
number’ and ‘a debt is a debt that must be paid’ act like a
chorus, add to the lyrical feeling and also help create unity in a
play that sprawls over decades.
 THE PLAY 59

Things to do
● Design a set for the play, taking in to account all the
locations it needs to include and any information you can
glean from the play about what it needs to contain.
● In pairs, make a list of all the songs in the play. Once your
list is complete, for each song decide on three or four
words that you feel best describe its mood and impact on
the audience.
● Compare Kiki Dee’s and Barbara Dickson’s versions of
‘Tell Me It’s Not True’ (available online). Which version do
you prefer and why?
● Create some short scenes between Mickey/Edward or Mrs
Johnstone/Mrs Lyons (for example, you could decide to
recreate Mrs Johnstone’s interview for her job or Mickey
and Edward meeting up again in the school holidays). Think
carefully about the different kinds of language they use.
Consider, for example, how they say hello and goodbye,
what they call each other and their accents.

Critical reception
Willy Russell has said: ‘If you have got a play that lasts as long
as Blood Brothers does it is amazing looking at the historical
shift in the way it is viewed. Initially some of the hostility
towards it was vitriolic.’ Some reviewers have seen the show
more than once and have changed their minds about the play
in the process. Here, the novelist Beryl Bainbridge (1932–2010)
comments on seeing the show for a second time in 2002.

I first went to see the shows eight years ago, and failed to
appreciate it. I think I was still thinking of musicals in terms
of Guys and Dolls and Oklahoma!, whose songs were more
60 BLOOD BROTHERS

memorable than the storyline. Seeing Blood Brothers for

the second time recently, I now realize that I ought to have
thought of the music as a moving accompaniment to a very
dark and affecting drama. (197, 2002)

Writing in 1983, Steve Grant suggests some of the reasons for

the differing opinions which might be useful in thinking about
why critics have responded in different ways.

Of all the types of contemporary theatre on offer, surely the

musical exerts the greatest amount of controversy. Add to
this the North v South element which runs through all such
cultural exchanges and you have a potential minefield of
opposing viewpoints. London critics and theatregoers are
apt to find provincial shows unsophisticated and politically
naïve. Supporters will reply that the North has put the
working classes back into the theatre, is more exuberant
and down to earth than its more rarified and modish
Southern counterpart.

Things to do

R ead through the following review extracts, all taken from

the tenth anniversary of Blood Brothers in the West End,
picking out any words, phrases and ideas that are used to praise
or criticise the play. Look up any unfamiliar words in a dictionary.

‘Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers has been trundling along in the

West End for 10 years now – more if you include the original,
unsuccessful production – and I must say I’ve never paid it
much heed [. . .] Blood Brothers is melodramatic, of course,
and over-insistent. The Narrator – who is Russell’s Greek
chorus – disseminates doom-laden ditties between every single
scene; his over-earnest fatalism casts too dark a shadow.
Similarly, Russell [. . .] can’t resist contrasting the twins’
 THE PLAY 61

parallel experiences. When the nippers are nicked for stone-

throwing, the local bobby shares a drink with Mr Lyons, but
only sharp words with Mrs Johnstone. Elsewhere, infant
Mickey rides his imaginary horse like John Wayne. Edward as
if he’s at his first gymkhana. And Edward’s first term at the
university is thrown into grim relief by Mickey’s grinding
experience of the dole. The dice, in other words, are loaded
against the well-to-do, and our sympathies are frog-marched
towards the underdog. It’s no coincidence that the productions
weaker performances are the wealthier family; the parts are
unsympathetically written.’ (Brian Logan)

‘Next to this tremendously satisfying, passionately felt show, the

recent flurry of new musicals (Dr Dolittle, Whistle Down the
Wind) seems all the more plastic, pointless and bloodless. Blood
Brothers is a gripping, gritty – and superbly hummable – drama
[. . .] Russell’s angry social document is cunningly disguised as
melodrama. And with the savage inexorability of Greek tragedy,
the truth burns its way out. [. . .] While tears are guaranteed, so
is laughter . . .’ (Georgina Brown)

‘Its roots are deep in the myth about twins separated at birth,
the one that always served the Greeks and Shakespeare well
enough; and although it is unmistakeably set in the Liverpool
of the early 1980s, Blood Brothers remains almost alarmingly
topical since none of its central issues of poverty, unemployment
and class warfare has gone away in the meantime.’ (Sheridan
Morley)

‘For those who haven’t seen it – as I hadn’t until last week – it’s
the story of a Liverpudlian working-class mother, desperately
short of funds [. . .] A show that runs for 10 years without
benefit of hype or lavish effects is plainly giving people
something they want. On the night I was there the audience
rose to its feet at the end, as I am told it usually does, with
near-religious rapture. [. . .] my own feelings are mixed. The
show does have an undeniable driving force, but its folk-tale
62 BLOOD BROTHERS

elements are jumbled up with a good deal that is downright

corny, some of its social judgements have the crudeness of a
badly drawn cartoon, and matters aren’t helped by the presence
of a lugubrious narrator . . .’ (John Gross)

‘How to explain the durability of Willy Russell’s Blood

Brothers, which celebrates, in my view deservedly, its tenth
birthday in the West End this week? [. . .] Blood Brothers
would scarcely have run for a decade if it were at root an
earnest treatise about the inequality of opportunity in modern
England. Whatever its rational pretensions, the piece beats
with a primitive heart. Russell virtually concedes as much by
failing to explain why, in defiance of social probability and the
class logic he is busily exposing, Eddie and Mickey meet as
boys, exchange blood vows, and remain close friends into their
prime. He is exploiting the myths and legends about the eerie
symbiosis of twins. He is writing a folk ballad for the Thatcher
and post-Thatcher eras – and why not?’ (Benedict Nightingale)

‘Adroitly entwining the culturally specific and the mythic, the

show expresses pain at the human devastation caused by
Thatcherite economics via a folk-tale plot [. . .] Threaded
through the saltily amusing script and the open-hearted score
are familiar Russell themes: the gains and losses of upward
mobility; the difficulty of assessing the advantages in another
person’s social situation from a non-self-referring perspective
(cf the hairdresser and the don in Educating Rita); the burdens
of being a woman and the yearning to escape from domestic
drudgery [. . .] its heart is in the right place – how many
musicals present a social argument of any kind? For that alone
I raise my glass.’ (Paul Taylor)

Some things you might want to consider having read these

extracts are:

● Why some of the critics admit they have not been to see
the show even though it has been running for ten years.
 THE PLAY 63

● How some of the writers reveal their attitude to the

audience and to the popularity of the show through
their use of language.
● How some critics are wary of, and sometimes
dismissive of, emotion.
● How some writers discuss why the show had lasted so
long in the West End and the kinds of other work they
relate it to.

Things to do

W rite a response to one of the review extracts above,

putting forward your own perspective on the play.

Related work
Willy Russell’s plays
Many of Willy Russell’s plays share themes in common with
Blood Brothers, themes of trying (and failing) to escape,
education, the impact of class and the hope that life could be
better. Educating Rita (1980), in contrast to Blood Brothers,
offers the possibility of choice. Rita comes late to education,
breezing into Frank’s university office declaring she wants to
know everything. Frank becomes increasingly concerned that
the kind of education he can offer which will teach her to
quote literary critics and pass exams will take away what is
unique about Rita. Towards the end, when she understands the
rules and rituals of education, he asks if this is all she wanted,
if she has ‘come all this way for so very, very little?’ (Russell,
1996, 355). But for Rita what is important is that education
has given her a choice where none previously existed. Unlike
the twins in Blood Brothers who have no choices but are
64 BLOOD BROTHERS

bound by fate, Rita can make her own decisions and for her
that ability is life itself. Our Day Out (made for television
1977; staged 1983), a play with songs, also offers some useful
points of connection and contrast with Blood Brothers.
Alongside arguments about other possible ways of lives being
lived, it includes a debate about what education is about for
working-class children with Mrs Kay (who has organized the
outing to Wales) determined that the children will at the very
least have a good day out. ‘It’s too late for them’, she tells
another teacher, Mr Briggs, because nobody knows what to do
with them (Russell, 1996, 148).

Jim Cartwright’s Road (1986)

Like Blood Brothers, Road ‘has come to represent a period
of British social history which saw the marked polarisation of
the classes and an exacerbation of the north–south divide’
(Milling, 2012, 247). It too explores the impact of Thatcherism
and offers an alternative representation of the north from
that seen in soap operas like Coronation Street (set in
Manchester) or Brookside (set in Liverpool and running from
1982 to 2003). Road takes place somewhere on the very edge
of a town somewhere in Lancashire, although Cartwright says
‘it might be in Liverpool or Bolton or Middlesbrough or
Newcastle’ (Cartwright quoted in Milling, 2012, 225). It too
has a narrator who guides the audience on a journey over
one day, meeting the inhabitants of the road as they drink,
fight, try to have a good time and pine for the past. The play
was performed as a promenade show where the theatre seats
are removed, taking the actors closer to the audience than
Russell does.
Funny and tragic like Blood Brothers, Road suggests there
are not always solutions to the problems of unemployment
and lack of hope. Joey takes to his bed to starve because there
is nothing else left to do. He is after something that is missing
because ‘life can’t be just this, can it? What everybody’s doing.’
(Cartwright, 1996, 40). As he lies there, he tries to make sense
 THE PLAY 65

of the world in a long monologue that has the same hurt and
anger heard from Mickey at the end of Blood Brothers.

I’m sick of people, people, stupid people. Frying the air with
their mucky words, their mucky thoughts, their mucky
deeds [. . .] Where has man gone? Why is he so wrong? Why
am I hurt all the way through? Every piece of me is bruised
or gnawed raw [. . .] What did I do? What was my crime?
Who do I blame?!
CARTWRIGHT, 1996, 42–3

He demands to know who has done this to him and why,

blaming business and religion for murdering the child in the
man. Although as he dies he concludes there are no solutions,
the play ends with an attempt to grasp at possibilities. As four
of the characters drink wine and listen to Otis Redding’s ‘Try a
Little Tenderness’, which reminds them of feelings you keep
forgetting, they start to demand magic and miracles and ‘light
out on the pavement’, as they desperately cling together
chanting, ‘somehow, a somehow, might escape’ (Cartwright,
1996, 83).

Lee Hall’s Billy Elliot: The Musical (based on the

film made in 2000; music by Elton John, 2005)
A number of musicals can be seen to provide influences for
Blood Brothers, including Lionel Bart’s Oliver! (1960). Like
Blood Brothers, it is definably British (it takes the audience on
a journey through Dickensian London) but still achieved
international success. More recently, Lee Hall’s Billy Elliot,
notably the stage musical rather than the film, offers parallels.
It too is set in the north (this time in the north-east) and makes
use of the language of the region (the programme provides
translations for some of the show’s language). It too is about
how the world you are born into can shape and restrict your
66 BLOOD BROTHERS

life and it too uses dancing as a means of escape and self-

expression, but here Billy, the son of a miner, overcomes family
bigotry and financial hardship to escape to the Royal Ballet
School. His success is set against the background of the
1984–5 miners’ strike and his personal triumph is counter-
pointed with the community’s decline, the show ending with
the collapse of the strike. Unlike Blood Brothers, this is a very
male world, full of muscular choreography as miners come up
against the police. Billy’s mother has died two years before and
whilst she is a ghostly presence in the show, it is Billy’s
relationship with his father and brother that form the centre of
the work. It also offers a more politicized criticism of
Thatcherism, starting with grainy film celebrating the
nationalization of the coal industry in 1945 and including a
song that celebrates the fact that Margaret Thatcher is one day
closer to her death. Lee Hall, in the programme, sees the play
as showing ‘that we are all capable of making lives for ourselves
which are full of joy and self-expression’ whatever our
circumstances. This stands in stark contrast to Mickey’s story.

Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff (1982)

Although a television series, Boys from the Blackstuff is an
important work in relation to Blood Brothers. It has come to
speak for a nation under Thatcher. It added two catch phrases,
‘gizza a job’ and ‘I can do that’, to the national vocabulary.
creating a folk hero for the 1980s in the shape of Yosser
Hughes. Written by fellow Liverpuddlian, Alan Bleasdale, and
set in Liverpool it focuses on five men who have lost their jobs
and are working on the side whilst signing on. Yosser’s story is
the most often cited following him as he loses his job, his wife,
his children, his house and his self-respect. He is reduced to
head-butting lamp-posts, lift walls, confessional boxes, and
policemen in an attempt to articulate his despair and take
away the pain. As an image of the impact of unemployment,
the series gives an insight into the cost to people’s lives and the
city of Liverpool in the 1980s.
 THE PLAY 67

Glossary of dramatic terms

Breaking the fourth wall The fourth wall is the imaginary wall that
exists between actors on the stage and the audience. No such wall
actually exists but the term means that actors pretend they cannot
see or hear the audience. Breaking the fourth wall means the actors
acknowledge the audience and may talk directly to them (as the
narrator does in Blood Brothers).

Catharsis A term used by Aristotle in Poetics which means the

relieving of emotional tensions (or excesses) through watching
tragedy. He does not discuss the term in detail and there is a lot of
argument about quite what he meant by it. One way to think about
it is the way you feel better after watching a sad film that has made
you cry.

Dramatic irony This is a device by which a playwright draws on

knowledge that the audience have, but the characters in the play do
not, in order to create dramatic tension. The fact that the audience
knows the truth about the twins whilst the boys do not means
that Blood Brothers is constructed around dramatic irony. Other
moments also contain dramatic irony, for example, when Edward
asks Mrs Lyons if she has a secret too.

Episodic This kind of dramatic structure is associated with the

plays of Brecht and involves lots of relatively short scenes linked
together by the same character, place or theme. In Brecht, scenes
could be moved around and placed in a different order because
there is no overall beginning, middle and end. In Blood Brothers,
scenes unfold in a chronological way but there are jumps of time.

Foreshadowing This is when a writer hints at a theme or

circumstance early on in their play that will later be developed
more explicitly. In Blood Brothers, for example, the children’s game
and Edward giving Mickey the present of a gun foreshadow the
ending.

Motif A recurring idea or object in a text that has a symbolic

significance. Through its repetition, it can help highlight important
ideas and themes.
68 BLOOD BROTHERS

Naturalism Naturalism is a style of theatre, usually connected to

the work of theatre practitioner Constantin Stanislavski and late
nineteenth/early twentieth-century playwrights such as Anton
Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen. It involves the detailed and realistic
representation of life on stage.

Open stage Traditional proscenium arch stages (which look like a

box with a picture frame on the side open to the audience) keep the
audience and the actors separate and lend themselves to illusionistic
theatre. Open stages, which can take on a variety of physical
configurations, allow for much closer actor/audience relationship.
The original version of Blood Brothers for schools was in the round
with the audience sitting on all four sides of the stage.

Prologue A separate introductory section of a work. It establishes

the setting and gives background information. It comes from the
Greek words pro (before) and logos (the world). It can be a separate
speech, as Russell refers to when he talks about Henry V, or a scene
(and a song) as in Blood Brothers.

Set The set is the environment that is constructed on a stage for a

play to take place within. For more detail on this, see the section on
‘Design’ within ‘Dramatic technique’.

Setting The setting is the place or places in which the fictional

world of the play occurs, which may be represented by the set.
Whilst the set is a real space, inhabited by actors, the setting is a
fictional space, inhabited by characters.

Soliloquy The act of speaking one’s thoughts aloud when alone

or regardless of anyone else who might seem to hear what you are
saying. Mickey’s rhyme about Sammy is one example in Blood
Brothers. The twins’ song, when they are both on stage together but
cannot seem to hear what the other is saying, is another.

Subtext There are two ways for dramatists to reveal information

about their characters and narrative. They can state information
directly and explicitly in the text. For example, a character can tell
another character what they are thinking or feeling, or about
something that has happened to them in the past. However, relying
 THE PLAY 69

too much on this sort of dialogue can lead to clunky and awkward
writing. Playwrights are aware that, in real life, people do not always
immediately tell each other what is bothering them or how they are
feeling. This has led dramatists to make frequent use of subtext,
where a character’s dialogue says one thing directly, but may imply or
suggest other things, through what is left unsaid or by the way the
actor is instructed to say the lines. In Blood Brothers, the narrator
sometime functions to tell us what a character is feeling.

Unity of time and place Derived from Aristotle’s Poetics, these are
plays in which the action is limited to a single plot (unity of action),
a single location (unity of place), and the events of a single day
(unity of time). Blood Brothers, spanning more than two decades
and moving through a number of locations, does not conform to
this model.

Well made play This is a kind of play traditionally associated with

late nineteenth-century theatre which followed a series of rules
including a tight plot (often connected to a missing letter or
information that has fallen into the wrong hands), a revelation and
a denouement (an unfolding of the events at the end). It has come to
be used for plays that follow a traditional structure observing unities
of time and place. Examples can be seen in (some of) the work of
Terence Rattigan, Ibsen and Alan Ayckbourn.
70
 CHAPTER TWO

Behind the Scenes

Willy Russell (WR)

RM: Why do we start with the end?

WR: I learnt very early on the truth about tragedy. The

catharsis that is achieved through tragedy is a cyclical thing.
People do go to see Hamlet time and time again or they can go
to see Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman many, many times.
And every time, subsequent to your first visit, you take your
seat knowing the end. Now what does that do? Knowing the
end, contrary to expectation, doesn’t diminish the theatrical
experience for you. It heightens it and makes matters more
important because you are watching it knowing that this
character and this situation are moving towards doom. Now,
I’m not William Shakespeare or Arthur Miller. I can’t give the
audience the benefit of knowing the story and they might
never come and see it again. Instead, I show them the end so
they know that these twins are going to die and that heightens
everything. In the same way, some narrative ballad singers
would sing the end of the song first to let the audience know
and then go back to the beginning of the song. And often
again, people would listen to the same songs time and time
and time again and it gets richer with the retelling.

71
72 BLOOD BROTHERS

RM: Why does that happen?

WR: Because we are human beings and your watching of the

piece is now more loaded because you are not watching it to
find out what happens. Of course, the need to know what
happens next is primal but sometimes you need to work in a
different way. Take Tom and Jerry. You watch Tom and Jerry,
merely because you need to know what happens next, because
you need to know if the cat gets the mouse. You don’t watch it
because of the flaw in the character of the cat that takes him
inexorably towards his own doom. Now, when you see Blood
Brothers, you see them playing a game in the first act and they
are saying the whole thing is just a game. It’s full of allusions
to the doom it will eventually reach and you wouldn’t see that
if you didn’t know what was going to happen. The fact that I
use a lot of humour and comedy on the journey is because I
don’t want it to be a doom-laden evening. Tragedy should not
have a feeling of hopelessness because, even though you know
what will happen, you still sit there hoping that Hamlet will
take some kind of action that will avoid that end.

RM: It is also very episodic structurally.

WR: I was introduced to that form of theatre really before I

went to theatre because when I was twenty I went back to
education, after having had such a spectacularly failed time at
school, and I did ‘O’ Level (GCSE ) English Literature. I was
introduced to Shakespeare for the first time because, like a lot
of people, I had a terrible prejudice against Shakespeare and
we studied Henry V. One of the things I noticed early on was
that a Shakespeare play was closer to a movie structure than it
was to a play. I had seen plays on television which were well-
made plays that observed unities of time and place, but
Shakespeare didn’t. You want a new scene, a character comes
on, tells you where the scene is and you just move on effortlessly.
He even says at the beginning of Henry V, audience help us
with this will you. The chorus comes on at the start and says
 BEHIND THE SCENES 73

we’re going to do incredible things during the next two hours.

We’re going to see massive armies of thousands of men. We’re
going to sail galleons across the Channel. We’ve got to go to
France and all we’ve got is this little bit of wood called our
stage. But, audience if you lend us your imaginations we’ll get
there, we’ll see the battles and we’ll be on the galleons.
Then, of course, I went to the Everyman Theatre where there
was a similar style, which was loose and episodic, a sprawling
house-style that had grown up through the efforts of John
McGrath1 and Alan Dossor.2 Their influences had come through
Brecht shot through with a fun-loving, anarchic Joan Littlewood3
approach to theatre. They wanted theatre to matter to the mass
of the people in whose city the theatre existed. So when I wrote
my first big play for them, John, Paul, George, Ringo and Bert, I
remember saying to Alan Dossor, because I had an idea of
setting it in a room somewhere and observing the unities of time
and space, do you want that or do you want me to write it in the
Everyman house style with songs, a narrator moving in and out,
comedy, addressing the audience and acknowledging that there
is an audience that were in a theatre? And that is what he
wanted. Interestingly, I saw him on the first night of Blood
Brothers at the Lyric and he was full of praise and I said to him,
‘You do realize it came out of the Everyman house style.’
I also did a piece in Edinburgh called Sam O’Shanker that
had piano accompaniment and we’d borrowed and hired
things like rain machines and thunder sheets and wind
machines. In rehearsals, we were at the point where Sam
O’Shanker was driving off and the rain was falling and I
suddenly said to everyone, ‘Do you know what, this is
ridiculous. Let’s just get two benches, bring it all out front, and

1
John McGrath (1935–2002) was a writer and founder of the theatre company
7:84.
2
Alan Dossor is a theatre director who was artistic director of Liverpool
Everyman Theatre from 1970–1975.
3
Joan Littlewood (1914–2002) was a theatre director who ran Theatre Royal
Stratford East in London from 1953–1975.
74 BLOOD BROTHERS

put it on the stage.’ So the audience could see somebody

creating the wind. When we had a lightening flash, I got
somebody to cut a big arrow out of card and you just threw the
card across the stage. There were gales of laughter. You could
see the piano being played but it still created a tension when
you needed it. So when I got to Blood Brothers I am working
with the director Chris Bond. Chris is a product of the Liverpool
Everyman and all that kind of style so I don’t even have to have
a dialogue with him about this. The whole of the band will be
on stage in a very prominent position, high up in the gantry, so
that you, the audience, at any point can look and see a keyboard
player, a flautist, a violinist. You can see them changing
instruments, and turning over their score. When we get to a
point in the play when we can use the band to drop in ‘To Let’
signs and ‘For Sale’ Signs and ‘city in decay’ signs, they join in.
In the kid’s game, they throw stuff down and shout. That’s how
Blood Brothers was originally conceived and produced. It is as
open to the audience as is possible. Now, over the years it has
been taken further back on to the stage. I’m not saying that is
not a valid way to do it. You could make an argument that the
production has been running for a long time and it is much
more of a successful production than the Liverpool Playhouse
production which only ran for six months in the West End. But,
for me, that original production is my type of theatre.

RM: What aspects of the first production made it your kind

of theatre?

WR: One interesting thing about the first production is that

while I compose music I don’t formally write notation, so I
record it. I would do a demo with the musical director on this
little studio set up, so when we got to do the show, all of the
songs were written and demoed. We wanted to hire musicians in
a different way to normal. Usually, in a musical, you just have a
piano player in rehearsals who plays all the band parts, because
bands are very expensive things. Then you move into the theatre
and that’s when your band comes in and because they are
 BEHIND THE SCENES 75

playing from scores and they are fast sight readers that is
considered completely fine. We didn’t want to go down that
route. We wanted it to be much more of an organic process
because we wanted the band to play with a certain feel that
doesn’t come easily if you are reading from a score. We didn’t
give the band carte blanche. Everything was written but it was
given to them in demo form so they had to listen to it and play
it rather than read it. Lots of bands work like that. John Lennon
and Paul McCartney did exactly the same thing. They didn’t
write the stuff down. So it meant we had the band in rehearsal
from day one and Chris could say, for example, there’s a moment
early on where Eddie gives Mickey the gift of a gun when he is
leaving and Chris said wouldn’t it be lovely to underscore that
moment, get the trumpet player to play some bars of the chorus
from ‘Easy Terms’ plaintively in the background. If you’ve got
the traditional pit band, you can’t do that kind of stuff because
it’s not written down. So it meant that we had that freedom to
tap into the band whenever we wanted to.
It should also be said that the style was dictated by the first
small version of the play for schools because we could only
have five actors. So I had to come up with the idea of the
narrator who played every other small role that was required
and in the original full production at Liverpool Playhouse that
is exactly what we did. It’s about moving fast and it’s about
saying to the audience, one minute he’s the narrator speaking
verse and the next minute he’s coming in as the milkman. It’s
playful. Of course, the narrator is all-knowing. He is the one
character on stage who knows the end of the story. He shares
the audience’s knowledge and he is commenting all the time.
‘This is going to happen, don’t get carried away. Having a great
time are you? Don’t forget that. . . .’ But that was never written
in a ponderous voice of doom kind of a way and the original
stage directions said that it should be spoken idiomatically not
in a BBC accent. It was all very simple. If we could do it on
stage, we just did it. There’s a moment where Eddie and Mickey
go to see a porn movie and all we had was two actors and two
chairs and a sound track and it creates cinema brilliantly in
76 BLOOD BROTHERS

front of your eyes. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity all the time.

Just make the right stroke. Don’t over dress it.

RM: Is it a Brechtian musical?

WR: It’s Brechtian in the sense that he was another big influence
on me. There was a debate at some point about is Blood Brothers
a musical or is it a play with songs. It doesn’t matter. It is what it
is. Again, because of my knowledge of Brecht and the type of
theatre that Joan Littlewood did, probably primarily Oh! What a
Lovely War, and the work of people like McGrath and Chris
Bond at the Everyman, it was just the done thing to include songs.
You didn’t have to call it a musical or a play with songs. When I’d
written my first piece for the Everyman, When the Reds, an
adaptation of an Alan Plater play, there had been a couple of
songs in that but because I’d been functioning as a song writer for
a long time, I just put lots more songs in. So it was completely
natural for me to put songs in, the way Brecht did, but there is
now all this theory around Brecht about what he is trying to
achieve in terms of alienation technique. I wasn’t doing that. I’ve
always known that by using melody you can heighten and achieve
a depth of emotion that without melody you would be hard
pressed to achieve. Music is the most visceral of all the arts. It cuts
through everything. Occasionally, you hear a speech that it is
difficult to listen to without tears coming to your eyes, like Martin
Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ for example, but the music of the
voice is part of the reason that happens to you. There are not
many speeches that will do that but any one of us can pass an
open door, hear a snatch of music and be reduced to tears. I’ve
always known that music has that power and I wanted to harness
that because I wanted Blood Brothers to have big emotion. I
wanted the audience to know we had been through something
monumental together. Imagine if Blood Brothers ended with
‘And do we blame superstition for what came to pass. . . .’ You
would want your money back. You have got to sing that grief,
wail that grief. You have got to realize the anthemic, allow the
elegiac to be given voice. ‘Tell Me It’s Not True’ does nothing in
 BEHIND THE SCENES 77

terms of plot but it is totally crucial to the experience of engaging

with Blood Brothers. The lives that I am depicting deserve music,
something of the quasi-operatic. These are big, big events in the
lives of these people and they are big lives therefore.

RM: Do you mind it being called a Greek tragedy?

WR: No although it’s not a Greek tragedy because in strict

Aristotelian terms there isn’t a fall from grace. They are not
elevated characters. Now in Arthur Miller’s essay ‘Tragedy and
the Common Man’, he argues that Willy Loman’s fall is just as
tragic and just as worthy as Hamlet’s fall and I take that
attitude, but I am just making the point that in the strict sense
it is not a tragedy. But neither, because the word was sometimes
applied pejoratively, is it a melodrama. It has elements, I think,
of tragedy and of melodrama but it isn’t strictly either of them.

Glen Walford (director)

Glen Walford (GW) is a freelance director who has directed
many of Willy Russell’s plays including more than ten versions
of Blood Brothers, all abroad, several versions in Japan, two in
Korea as well as productions in Germany and Siberia.

RM: What is it about the play that means it can connect to

people, say, in Japan where you are going to direct your tenth
production next year?

GW: One of the reasons the play resonates so well with an

audience who doesn’t know Liverpool are the themes which
are epic, or we could say mythical, in their scope. It is operatic
in its nature and it is Greek tragedy in its nature and it is funny
too. All of these things help it to speak to people who don’t
necessarily know the details of where it is set. It deals, for
example, with death which is symbolized through the guns and
the kid’s game and, of course, the deaths at the end. So we are
78 BLOOD BROTHERS

taken into an immense realm of life and death. Then on another

level there are themes which affect everyone on a more day to
day level, like education. It looks at the differences in education
between how a privileged child is educated and how poor kids
are just ignored and how dependent you are on where you are
placed in society in terms of how you grow up and what
happens to you. So, focusing in on Sammy and Mickey, both of
them have masses of imagination and if they were in an
education system that respected that, instead of focusing only
the rational, then they would own the world. So, it is also
about how much an education system should value the power
of the imagination over the rational and learning through
imagination. The play is such a complex weaving of themes
that there’s almost nothing it isn’t about.

RM: Is there anything you change when directing the show

abroad?

GW: The key is never to try to do what separates cultures but

look for what brings them together. I think it’s unnecessary to
change everything, even names of places, to suit the local
culture. Just think how upset you would be if you went to see a
play set in Japan and they had changed all the references
because they thought you wouldn’t understand or be able to
connect to the themes in the play. People are perfectly happy
with seeing Liverpool brought to life on stage because in their
own imaginations they will equate Liverpool with whatever
equates to them. Of course, they do have some images of
Liverpool. They will know all about the Beatles more than
anything and they will know all about Liverpool football team
and they’ll know that Liverpool has good comedians but I don’t
really think it is necessary that they do. It’s like going to Narnia
or somewhere. The Liverpool thing is a land that you open up
for them on stage, so by the end of the play they will know
something about Liverpool. It’s not always necessary that you
know all the details about the culture it is coming from because
theatre is fundamentally about the power of imagination. If
 BEHIND THE SCENES 79

someone says to me, ‘Hello, I am Hamlet’, I’ll buy it and think,

well, invite me into your story. So, Blood Brothers is not just a
Liverpool play. It is a global play about the human condition
that belongs to everybody as Shakespeare does. He borrowed
things from all over the world. He wanted to put a tiger in the
Forest of Arden in As You Like It so he put one there without
regard to the limiting parameters of boring fact. Willy doesn’t
rigidly lock himself into Liverpudlianism. He is Liverpool born
and bred, it is in his blood and he loves the city but he certainly
reaches way beyond that particular place. And however far
away you are from Liverpool there are things in the play you
can and will connect to. That is the vital thing.

RM: But there must be some things which an audience, say

in Japan, finds harder to connect to?

GW: Of course there are differences. So, for example, in

Japan, they don’t have experience of class or they say they
don’t but they do because they have a tradition of the rich,
noble families and samurais and all of that and it is all class.
But they don’t relate to it in the same way. Yet, they get the
differences when they see the differences between Eddie and
Mickey on stage. They see it coming alive in the costumes of
the twins and the behaviour of Mrs Johnstone and of Mrs
Lyons and of Eddie when he is at home with his dictionary and
the very adult way Mr and Mrs Lyons try to respond to a boy
whereas Mrs Johnstone is instinctive with the way she responds
because she is a kid herself.

RM: So the characters then help an audience abroad connect

to the play?

GW: Of course. If you are studying character in Blood

Brothers which is an important way to look at it, you will see
that they are the kinds of characters you can find all over
the world. Take Sammy for example. The audience should
like Sammy, which might sound strange considering his wild,
80 BLOOD BROTHERS

anti-social behaviour, but if they don’t respond lovingly to

Sammy then Willy’s point is lost because the kids follow
Sammy and they don’t follow Sammy because he is a bully –
although he is. But if you look at Sammy, you will see there is
much more to him than we might see on the surface. You’ll see
he is scared of women and that he is also utterly charming
because he is funny as well, and imaginative.

RM: Isn’t it true that all of the characters are more

complicated and more multi-faceted than they first appear?

GW: The characters are very, very complex and how you
portray them or think about them is important. So, with Mrs
Lyons, when she’s singing about imagining her child and
holding him, there should be a real sense of a mother’s love for
her children. And also in the scene with Mrs Johnstone when
she is saying the most heart wrenching things like when he was
a child I used to look at him and think he knows that he is not
really mine, he knows I have taken him from his real mother.
In both those moments there is much more to Mrs Lyons than
simply being the bad character.

RM: Is there something in the structure of the play that helps

the audience connect?

GW: One of the things that helps the play feel so universal is
the narrator who is such a non-specific character, and in my
productions I have often looked for ways to enhance that role.
So, as in the original production, the band is always on stage and
fully visible. They play either side of the cut-outs of the roofs of
the houses and you can see all of them. They are involved in the
action. They throw balls down and they throw the babies down
at the beginning. It adds to the theatricality of the performance
but it also helps create more focus on the narrator’s role. In the
last production I did the narrator spent quite a bit of time on the
roof with the band and she (it was a woman who played the role
in that production) was much more highlighted by being with
 BEHIND THE SCENES 81

them. I have also brought an entire Greek chorus on in the

production in Siberia to highlight emotions and the moments.

RM: You were in Liverpool in the 1980s, as artistic director

of the Everyman Theatre, so you saw the first production of
Blood Brothers. What was Liverpool like?

GW: To me it seemed very broken down when I went up there.

It had a spirit of course because it has always had that. I had a
love–hate relationship with the place because some days you
were just depressed beyond belief about how run down everything
was and how it was despised by the rest of the country, never
given enough money, never given enough respect. The Everyman
was so special and you just got on with the work that you wanted
to do, you got on with weaving dreams no matter how decrepit
it all was. And there was an incredible spirit there. There was no
question about the humour and the courageous resilience. It was
all there. It was a most important time in my whole life and I
wouldn’t have stayed there so long if it hadn’t been.
I saw the very first production of Blood Brothers at the
Liverpool Playhouse and thought it was wonderful. It zipped
along at a cracking pace at the same time conveying the
poignancy and depth in all the characters. Barbara Dickson as
Mrs Johnstone pulled on the audience’s heart-strings with her
glorious voice and deeply felt love for her children. I knew
then that I would like to direct it myself but didn’t realize that
I would still be directing many variations of it all these years
later and in many parts of the globe.

RM: Why does Blood Brothers still connect to an audience

today?

GW: It works, the same way Shakespeare still works because

the story, the characters, the music, the humour, the tragedy
resonates with the audience. I don’t think you can pin this
down to notions of ‘relevance’. If it’s good it is going to connect.
There’s a story about a kid who had seen Blood Brothers in
82 BLOOD BROTHERS

Japan and wrote to the chairman of Shochiku company who

had put the play on and said he wanted to see Blood Brothers
again and asked if they could revive it. The chairman actually
wrote back to him and said yes we are going to do it in a
couple of years and the child wrote back saying he was really
pleased they were doing it again and sent a sketch he had done
of two little boys standing together in a corner looking out
into a world of nothing but with hope and love. This sketch
went on the front of the next programme and it’s my favourite
Blood Brothers front. It’s a picture of how you want Eddie and
Mickey to be. You wish they could be together and that’s what
this little boy in Japan had seen when he watched the show
which is a testament to the universality of the play.

Peter Treganna (actor)

Peter Treganna (PT) played Edward for a year in 1993/4 in the
production that marked both the tenth anniversary of the
original production in Liverpool and the fifth anniversary of
Bill Kenwright’s production in the West End.

RM: As an actor do you look at your character in a systematic

way before you start rehearsing?

PT: You have to. I had about five days from the time I was cast
until we started rehearsing. I had seen the show two or three
years earlier, so I had an idea about the production but it was
very vague, so the first thing was just reading the script again to
familiarize myself with the story. Then I focused on the scenes I
was in initially to see the character development. First, I identified
what age he was in each scene and then read each scene through
to myself, trying to think about what his character had done
prior to walking on stage because what you are trying to do is
build up and flesh out the character. The words are there but you
need to find out who that character is. Obviously when he’s a
seven year old I looked at what his life would have been like up
 BEHIND THE SCENES 83

to that point. There are lots of clues in the script. The father’s not
been around when Mrs Lyons is ‘pregnant’ but there is a strong
sense that he’s not had too much to do with bringing up his son.
I suppose I saw Eddie as a product of his parental upbringing.

RM: Are there some specific things you thought about in

relation to Edward as a young boy that helped you understand
the character?

PT: One of them was thinking about the kind of school he

was at. Mickey’s at the local state primary school. Eddie was in
his cap and smart shorts and jumper and tie, so he is obviously
being educated in a different kind of school. While it doesn’t
say it in the script, my thoughts were that because he came
from a privileged background and was going to go to a
boarding school, he was at preparatory school in Liverpool.
Under those circumstances, you start to think of the people
you know who had been to prep school. I’d been to a state
school but I knew kids who had been to prep school and I
thought about how my experiences of knowing them might
help me understand Eddie. What you try and find is how
somebody like that would react under certain circumstances.
Creating a character on stage, like discovering them through
reading the script, is a process. The rehearsal period was short,
so there was still development going on over the first months
in performance where you were finding new things. It is a
process in that a play is never complete without an audience
and there are certain things you only discover when you are
performing. So, for example, there are scripted laughs but
there are also the laughs you get when you are before an
audience who respond to things that happen, to your
mannerisms and the inter-action between characters.

RM: What kind of mannerisms did Eddie have?

PT: I played him as being terribly proper. You wanted to play

up the contrast between the rough kid Mickey who is super
84 BLOOD BROTHERS

streetwise and Eddie who was prim and proper and had never
been exposed to someone like Mickey before or met kids in
gangs. I used to imagine him as playing chess and cricket with
strict teachers and strict parents who perhaps were a little
more distant emotionally and physically than Mickey’s mother.
He has been very cossetted in his life, overly protected,
dominated by his parents. He hasn’t been given the opportunity
to run free. So he is quite tight as a person. He has grown up
in an environment where manners counted so he is very polite.
All of that makes Eddie into someone who, in the first half
of the show, is physically quite straight, not someone who is
fluid. He’s someone who stands to attention, almost like a
little soldier. I was very aware that the early scenes took
place in the early 60s, only fifteen years or so after the end
of the war and at a time when National Service had only
just finished.4 In those days, kids from Eddie’s background
tended to have parents who were relatively stiff and they
pushed that on to their kids. Kids didn’t have flexibility, even
in the way they communicated with adults. Eddie knew that he
had to say please and thank you. He was freaked out and
worried about the police when Mickey talked about doing
anything naughty.

RM: But he quite likes that as well?

PT: I think his eyes are opened to a different way. With

Mickey, he has the curtains drawn away from this whole other
world that he’s had no experience of but as he does experience
it he gets a real buzz from it. I think this is why he sort of falls
in love with Mickey in the way you fall in love with those
people you meet in life who bring something remarkable into
your life and change your perceptions.

4
National Service came into existence after World War Two and meant that all
men between the ages of 17 and 21 had to serve 18 months in the Armed
Forces. It ended in 1960.
 BEHIND THE SCENES 85

RM: So, as an actor you start with the script and thinking
about what you can find out about the character?

PT: Yes. You identify what the script says in as much detail as
possible about the character. You can pick that up from what
he says, from where other people refer to him and also the way
people react to him and that gives you the skeleton of the
character.

RM: How does Eddie’s character change as he grew up?

PT: When they meet again, it is about the gaucheness of

adolescence. You’ve got Mickey who already has some kind of
relationship with Linda and has developed in some ways and
you’ve got Eddie who has no experience with girls at all. He
sees this super cool guy who seems much more at ease on
certain levels. There is still some of that imbalance you’ve seen
between them at seven but I figured that by this time people
who go to public school develop this innate confidence
engendered by the public school system but that very often is
more like a shell. Inside there is a whole raft of other things
going on. For those scenes I thought about this guy I had met
one summer who had been at Eton. Eddie hadn’t been at Eton
but he had been at a boarding school. He came across as just
so inherently confident in some ways but if he encountered
things that were out of his normal experience, he could be
incredibly unconfident.

RM: Are they both a bit more similar at fourteen though?

Mickey’s also got a shell. He is a bit of a lad but doesn’t know
what to say to Linda.

PT: That’s the interesting thing in the song, ‘That Guy’. They
want to be each other. And I think we also have to remember
they are twins and the connection that can exist between
twins is remarkable, even with those separated at birth. I think
when they come together, on an unconscious level, they see the
86 BLOOD BROTHERS

bits of them that are incomplete and the other one completes
them.

RM: Does Eddie love Linda?

PT: He loves Linda and he loves Mickey. His love for Linda
is that first boy/girl love. As far as we know he has no other
experience with girls and he is blown away by Linda. He is
really desperately keen to allow that love to develop but at the
same time he can see the spark between Mickey and Linda and
in the end, his affection for both of them means he sacrifices
his own chances to help bring them together. There is also an
element where he realizes that the reality of his existence means
it could never happen. Probably deep down he was convinced
that if he took Linda home, Mrs Lyons would not have been
very happy. But overall, the intensity of his connection with
Mickey is such that he would give Mickey the chance rather
than himself. And, of course, Linda does love Mickey. They do
end up having a light romance. When we were doing the show,
inevitably I talked with the actor playing Linda [Emma Tate]
about how far that romance goes. The script only says that
something happens. We thought they probably had the odd
kiss or two but nothing more. The script says they kick up
leaves, which suggests something quite innocent.
When Mickey comes crashing into the Town Hall, Eddie is
surprised and he’s surprised that Mickey blames him for
everything. From the audience’s perspective, you have seen
their lives and how they have been brought to where they are,
but from Eddie’s perspective he made none of the choices. He
has just been put on this trajectory.

RM: So he’s not to blame for what happens?

PT: I didn’t think so. I felt sorry for Eddie in lots of ways
because I think he didn’t have freedom of choice in his life.
Mickey did not have freedom of choice either but with Mickey
there was a lot more freedom generally. Every time you see
 BEHIND THE SCENES 87

Eddie, he is very tight and very tidy. He never really grows up.
He’s still the slightly gauche university student, lacking life
experience. He’s never had to worry about money and he’s at
that point in his life where he’s not got to take responsibility
for anything even after university. We’re never told what job he
does but the inference is that it is a management job and there’s
a sense that his father’s got him the job and helped him become
a councillor. One of the things I used to think is that if he had
lived, Eddie might have moved to London and been part of the
Big Bang in the City. He comes from that sort of background.
It was still relatively rare to go to university in those days but
in the end, he is very blasé in not really appreciating or
understanding the reality of Mickey’ life.

Things to do

I n one of the interviews above, Glen Walford comments that

Blood Brothers works ‘the same way Shakespeare still
works’. In groups, discuss any connections you can find
between Blood Brothers and the Shakespeare play that you
are studying. Think about aspects such as structure, character
functions (e.g. contrasts), music, comedy and/or tragedy.
88
 CHAPTER THREE

Writing About the Play

Although the specific questions asked change every year, you

will always be asked to demonstrate certain skills and certain
knowledge about the play. Examiners will expect you to show
that you can:

● Develop an informed personal response, meaning you

should have your own opinions about the play. These
must be firmly located in evidence in the text (and the
production if you have seen it) and in any further
reading you have done.
● Illustrate your interpretation with appropriate evidence
from the play. You need to be able to select the
moments and quotations from the play that make your
argument convincing.
● Analyse the key features of the play showing how the
playwright has created meaning and effect through the
use of dramatic devices such as language and structure
and, in the case of Blood Brothers, music and song.
● Show an understanding of the relationship between the
text and the time when it was written (its context).
● Write in an appropriately formal style using suitable
vocabulary and terminology, keeping an eye on your
spelling, punctuation and grammar.

89
90 BLOOD BROTHERS

Developing a personal response

As you study the play, it is important to give yourself time to
develop your own opinion. You can do this in a number of
ways. Most important is to read the text through carefully a
number of times. It is useful to keep a notebook, to write down
your thoughts and impressions as you are reading; by the time
you have studied the play in detail you will have forgotten your
first thoughts and these can be important to show how your
ideas have changed and developed. It is also helpful to act out
the play with some classmates. Even a few scenes will help you
get a feel for how the language sounds and how different
interpretations can be found in the same lines. It will also help
you to think about the physical relationships between characters
and how meaning can be found in where the characters are
placed in a space, whether they look at each other as they speak
or how close they might stand to each other.
Discussions in small groups or with the whole class can also
help you develop your own ideas. Do make contributions as
this will help you think about how you make your own
argument and what evidence you might need to persuade
somebody to agree with your point of view. Do also listen to
what others say as this will help you think about other ways of
understanding the play. In the end, there are very few points of
view that are totally wrong as long as you can provide evidence
from the play to back it up

Finding evidence in the text

Things to do

L ook at the scene where the agreement is made between

Mrs Johnstone and Mrs Lyons (pp. 35–40), and consider
what you can discover about their characters. You should look
 WRITING ABOUT THE PLAY 91

not only at the dialogue (i.e. what is said) but also at the stage
directions (including how things are said) and what happens
(i.e. the character’s actions).

The dialogue and stage directions give us some of the

information. Mrs Lyons, for example, calls Mrs Johnstone,
‘Mrs J’ suggesting familiarity coupled with a lack of concern
about who she really is. She starts by showing some kindness
for the worried cleaner, asking her to sit down, but once the
idea of getting a child of her own is planted, she takes control,
issuing commands, to get what she wants. She interrupts
Mrs Johnstone, not allowing her a chance to refuse and
thinking quickly of a series of reasons as to why it is a good
idea. The speed with which she comes up with arguments
suggests she is used to getting her own way and not above
twisting what has been said to her to get what she wants. Her
use of language, which is full of imperatives, such as ‘give one
of them to me’ and ‘quickly, quickly, tell me’, establishes her
control over Mrs Johnstone and makes it harder for Mrs
Johnstone to say no (36). Yet, she is also uncertain. As she
runs out of reasons, she simply says, ‘Please, Mrs Johnstone.
Please.’ (36). Whilst she cannot then articulate her desperation
in words, she can sing about her real feelings and her loneliness
although as soon as she has revealed this she ‘gives a half
smile and a shrug, perhaps slightly embarrassed at what
she has revealed’ (37). Once Mrs Johnstone has agreed, she
takes control again, telling her that ‘from now on I do the
shopping’ (39). There is still a suggestion of her reliance on
Mrs Johnstone when she has to ask for her advice in placing
the cushion so she looks pregnant. This establishes a character
who is complex, controlling and manipulative but also
vulnerable and unhappy.
Mrs Johnstone is at a loss throughout much of the scene.
She does not know what to do about the fact she is having
twins, simply repeating the same idea in different ways from
92 BLOOD BROTHERS

saying ‘I had it all worked out’ to ‘we were just getting

straight’ (35). She loves her children but she is shown to be in
a situation she cannot resolve herself. She is amused by
Mrs Lyons suggestion, treating it as if it is ‘almost a joke’
suggesting she does not have a firm grasp on reality (36).
Looking around the house and seeing what life could be like
for her child suggests an imaginative mind at work and
her response to Mrs Lyons, when she opens up and tells her
what she really feels, suggests a character who is sympathetic
to others.
Actions also reveal important things about the characters.
Mrs Lyons has two moments where her actions make us see
something about her. Firstly, without even waiting for Mrs
Johnstone to agree, she grabs a cushion and arranges it beneath
her dress to suggest she is pregnant, implying little sympathy
for Mrs Johnstone and a confidence that she will agree. Yet, at
the moment Mrs Johnstone agrees she ‘goes across and kisses
her, hugs her’ showing how much this means to her (38). The
most important action for Mrs Johnstone is a nod, when she
assents to the plan. She cannot articulate the words, which
could suggest that she is reluctant and has no choice, but the
nod is preceded by a pause which suggests she is agreeing after
thinking about it and having listened to what Mrs Lyons has
said (or sung), even if she cannot quite bring herself to say the
words. Maybe her reluctance to speak might suggest to you
that she cannot admit to herself that this is happening, that she
is not facing up to reality.

Quoting from the play

When you use quotations you will need to be clear about
where they come from in the play, who is speaking and, at
times, for clarity, who they are speaking to. Given the lack of
scene numbers in Blood Brothers, it is easiest to locate
quotations through describing the particular moment. For
example, ‘In the scene where the twins first meet, Edward
 WRITING ABOUT THE PLAY 93

says . . .’ or ‘when the twins come out of the cinema they are
chanting . . .’ Do not forget that it is you who are quoting the
play and not the characters; they are saying or shouting or
exclaiming or singing – or whatever tone you envisage they are
using at this point.
Make sure that the quotation you use makes the point you
want to make and then make that point explicit, providing an
explanation for the reader, in what you say next. For example,
you might say: ‘By saying this, Mrs Johnstone shows she is not
very responsible.’ You do not need to make your own thought
process clear, so you do not need to say things like ‘I have
chosen this quote to show that . . .’ as the quotation and your
explanation make this clear to the reader.
The best way to learn quotes is by acting out the play and
learning the lines gradually as an actor would. In the
examination you will be expected to quote briefly from
memory, so it is useful to identify some short key quotations
that illustrate themes or characters. Look for quotations that
will explain something rather than just tell the story. So, for
example, in the scene where Linda tries to persuade Mickey to
come off the tablets, rather than picking Mickey saying he
‘can’t do without them’, the more interesting quotation might
be Mickey keeps taking the tablets so he ‘can be invisible’
because it says more about his state of mind (122–3). It is also
useful to try and embed your quotations in the sentence you
are writing as it makes the essay more fluent, so your argument
is easier to follow. For example, ‘When the twins meet up again
at Christmas, Mickey tells Edward he wishes he could still
believe in “all that blood brother stuff” but he cannot “because
while no one was looking I grew up”. It was all just “kids”
stuff.’ (115).

Analysing the playwright’s techniques

One of the things you will be asked to consider is how the
playwright creates meaning and effect. This means considering
94 BLOOD BROTHERS

not just what they communicate to the audience but also how
this is communicated – how they use dramatic techniques such
as set, costume, lighting, language, music and structure. Two
examples are considered below but there is more on this in the
section on dramatic structure.

Music
When the twins meet up again, Russell uses the song ‘That
Guy’ to allow the twins to voice their own thoughts without
the other one hearing, in a device that is called a soliloquy. The
song also allows for the differences and the similarities between
the twins to be expressed. Although they are, on the face of it,
singing individually about what is wrong with them, from acne
to bad breath, and they are physically separate to each other,
eyeing each other up, the song has them singing together.
Because it is a sung, rather than spoken, the audience can also
hear them singing the same tune and singing in harmony in a
way that suggests that despite their physical separation they
are connected.

Structure
The play has a cyclical structure, i.e. it starts at the same
point that it ends. It uses the same lines from the narrator
and Mrs Johnstone repeats ‘Tell me it’s not true.’ Both of
these dramatic techniques create a sense of inevitability and
fate. Russell also uses dramatic irony where the characters
know less than the audience (they are ‘in’ on the secret). This
adds to the tension as they wait for the characters to discover
the truth. The action also flows seamlessly with no scene
breaks, helping to create a sense of moving towards the
inescapable conclusion. Russell’s use of an episodic structure,
where the play jumps through time, also helps the audience
to compare the twins at various stages of their lives as they
move along their different paths. This is helped by the use of
parallel scenes. In the section on schools, there are two
adjoining scenes that allow for comparison between the twins’
experience and in the section where, as Mickey agrees to go
 WRITING ABOUT THE PLAY 95

on the job with Sammy, which is intercut with Edward

telling Linda that he has always loved her, their lives become
even more intertwined.

Moving from description to analysis

For most people, our first response when we are asked
about something we have read is to tell the story, to describe
what happens in it. This is different to analysing or evaluating
which is what you are being asked to do in essays and
examinations. For example, it would be descriptive to say that
Mrs Johnstone stands by herself on stage as the children
complain from off-stage that the baby is crying or that all the
other kids laugh at them for having free school meals.
Description is a matter of fact. It is objective. You are saying
what you can see or hear or what you have read. If you were
to analyse this moment, you would start to offer suggestions
about what it might mean or signify and you might start to
think about how it shows Mrs Johnstone as being alone (we
know her husband has left her) – with the burden of having to
deal with her large family by herself with very little money. If
you were to evaluate this scene, you would start to form a
critical judgement of it and to think about how it might show
something about her character. Why does she stay outside the
house and not go in to comfort her children who say they are
starving and cannot sleep? Why is her first response to their
distress to tell them not to swear? Is there something in this
moment that suggests a ‘bad’ mother? Or a mother who cannot
cope? She goes on to spin stories about food to come, a fantasy
fairy tale bedtime story to pacify them, so does this say
something different about her? All these questions suggest
something about the process of evaluation; it is much more
subjective than description and therefore moments can be
open to a variety of interpretations. However, whatever your
answers to the questions, you need to be able to provide
evidence to support what you think.
96 BLOOD BROTHERS

Things to do

S tarting with the following descriptions use them to

develop analysis and evaluation of the moments.

● The first time Mickey appears, aged ‘seven’, he is knocking

incessantly at his front door and carrying a toy gun.
● As the twins go off to the cinema, Mrs Johnstone is left
alone lilting the ‘We Go Dancing’ line.
● When Edward leaves to go to the country, he gives
Mickey his toy gun.

From analysis to argument

We tend to think that an argument is a disagreement but an
academic argument is different to falling out with a friend. It is
a set of reasons that are offered to support a proposal or an
idea; you might want to think about it as expressing a point of
view which is backed up by evidence. It should be more ordered
and more rational than an argument with someone you know
(which can get very heated and emotional) and you should try
and present both sides of an argument, for and against a
particular point of view. Of course, in your conclusion you can
come down heavily on one side or the other.
The best way to create a coherent argument is to take your
time planning your work and you need to think about the
points you want to make, the evidence to back these up and
the order in which it will be most persuasive to offer these. In
an examination, the temptation is to dive in and write as much
as possible as quickly as possible, but taking some time to plan
your argument will ensure you write a better answer. You are
less likely to forget something important, more likely to
organize your ideas clearly and more likely to understand what
the question is asking you to do. Make sure you also leave
 WRITING ABOUT THE PLAY 97

yourself enough time at the end to read through what you have
written to ensure your argument is made clearly.

Things to do

I n the play find three pieces of evidence to back up the

following claims:

● Blood Brothers suggests that nature is stronger than

nurture.
● Mrs Johnstone is to blame for the death of the twins.
● The Lyons family is used to present the middle class in a
negative light.

Now find three pieces of evidence that offer a different point

of view. In class, present your findings as a debate, for and
against each statement. At the end, you might want to decide
which argument was more persuasive.

Connecting the text to the context

All works of art can be seen as a product of the times and place
they were written in. You cannot fully understand Blood
Brothers, if you ignore the impact of Margaret Thatcher and
particularly her impact on cities like Liverpool. Whilst the play
is a dramatic fiction and not a history book, the world Russell
was living in is reflected in the play, particularly because Blood
Brothers is a play that deals with social issues like class and life
chances. The most obvious way it connects is in the section
dealing with unemployment, but this is not the only way and
for an audience watching the play in Liverpool Playhouse in
1983 there would have been a web of connections to be made
to the world they found themselves in. This is true reading
the play today. Context can relate to the time you read or see
98 BLOOD BROTHERS

the play in as well, a connection made by a reviewer in 2013

who noted that with all its talk of guns, job losses and human
misery ‘you could easily think that Blood Brothers was set in
Cameron’s Britain’ (Wright, 2013).
Ideally, when you write about context, you should refer to
it in the body of your writing rather than in a separate
paragraph. So, if you are writing about education and class,
you might want to discuss what you have learned about
secondary modern schools. You are trying to show how the
context is integrally linked to the play, so it should be discussed
in this way and not as something that is an after-thought or
bolted on. It is central to understanding the text.

Things to do

D iscuss the ways in which you can see the ideas of Blood
Brothers reflected in the world you find yourselves. You
may want to consider issues such as opportunities in education,
attitudes to single parents and childhood, unemployment and
poverty, belief in superstitions (or urban myths) or the attitude
of the police to people from different classes.

Writing with appropriate formality

In Blood Brothers, there is plenty of swearing and slang and
colloquialisms but in writing an essay, you need to adopt a
much more formal tone. Of course, you will want to capture
the flavour of the play (and language is important in Blood
Brothers) but this can be done through quotations or by
putting quotation marks around a word that is used in the
text. So for example, Edward giggles with glee when Mickey
whispers ‘the F word’ to him or Mickey’s ‘Mam’ is very
optimistic. Some other key things to remember when you are
writing include:
 WRITING ABOUT THE PLAY 99

● You should use the present tense when you are writing
about the play (try to think about it as if it is a living
thing happening in front of your eyes). For example,
‘Edward goes away to university’ not ‘Edward went
away to university’. There are times when you may
need to use the past tense; for example, referring to the
play’s context or the first production. So, ‘By 1978,
Liverpool had the highest unemployment rate in the
country’ or ‘The gauze for the first production of the
play carried an image of Marilyn Monroe.’
● Write in complete sentences and use paragraphs. Start a
paragraph for each new idea and ensure that these all
take your argument forward.
● You are asked to develop a personal response to the
play but when you are writing it is not always helpful
to write in the first person (i.e. I think that . . .). More
objective writing helps to give your writing more force
and rigour adding a greater authority to your argument
and focuses more on the play than on your subjective
(personal) thinking. Useful phrases to help you do this
might include:

The study of Blood Brothers reveals . . .

In this essay, it will be argued that Mrs Johnstone’s
belief in superstition causes the death of the twins
(instead of ‘In this essay, I will discuss . . .’)
This essay considers . . .
It can be imagined/argued that . . .

● Your own voice will still be apparent from what you

argue and the points that you make. There are times
when using ‘I’ can be helpful. You might, for example,
want to refer to your own response to a moment in the
production you have seen or to your initial response to
reading the text. For these moments of personal
experience, the use of ‘I’ is useful and pertinent.
100 BLOOD BROTHERS

Tell Me It’s Not True . . . a final word

When you are writing about the play, don’t forget that it is a
play and not real life. Aristotle in the Poetics uses the term
mimesis (like mime or mimic) or imitation to explain what is
distinctive about our experience of art. Art or drama presents
us with a version of reality but at one remove from it. We
know when we are in the theatre that we are watching not Mrs
Johnstone but an actor playing Mrs Johnstone (they stand on
stage and bow to us at the end, including the twins who have
just ‘died’) and the character is a construct created by the
writer. After all, when Mickey kills Edward we do not rush out
to call the police (who are there already!) but if we saw
someone shot on the street we would.
And do not forget that it is a play and not a novel. This
means that when you are writing about it, you need to be able
to talk about both what you have read on the page but also
what happens (or what might happen) on the stage because the
play is written to be performed. It is about both words and
actions. For example, if you are writing about superstition, do
not forget that quite often when things happen to the characters,
the narrator is on stage and visible to the audience as a
reminder. Or if you are writing about dancing, there is also
dancing in the show that is not necessarily evident in the script.
Think about the stagecraft of the writer and about the impact
of the play on the audience who are watching. If you have been
lucky enough to see the play, remember what it felt like and
what you saw as well as what you heard.
Above everything else, do not forget to enjoy studying and
thinking about the play! Studying a play can sometimes be
frustrating, so it is worthwhile stopping occasionally and
trying to recapture your thoughts on first reading or seeing the
play. Blood Brothers is a comedy as well as a tragedy, so there
should be plenty of laughs as well as tears.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristotle translated by Kenneth McLeish (1998) Poetics, London:

Nick Hern Books.
Beryl Bainbridge (2006) Front Row: Evenings at the Theatre: Pieces
from The Oldie, London: Continuum.
Michael Billington (1983) Review of Blood Brothers, Guardian,
12 April.
Michael Billington (2007) State of the Nation: British Theatre Since
1945, London: Faber and Faber.
Berthold Brecht (edited and translated by John Willett, 1986) Brecht on
Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, London: Eyre Methuen.
Georgina Brown (1998) Review of Blood Brothers at Phoenix
Theatre, Mail on Sunday, 2 August.
John Burgess (2005) The Faber Pocket Guide to Greek and Roman
Drama, New York: Faber and Faber.
Jim Cartwright (1996) Plays: 1, London: Methuen.
John Gill (1992) Willy Russell and His Plays, Birkenhead:
Countrywise.
Steve Grant (1983) Review of Blood Brothers at Lyric Theatre, Plays
and Players, April.
John Gross (1998) Review of Blood Brothers at Phoenix Theatre,
Daily Telegraph, 2 August.
Les Harding (2012) They Knew Marilyn Monroe, New York:
McFarland.
Brian Logan (1998) Review of Blood Brothers at Phoenix Theatre,
Observer, 2 August.
Andrew Marr (2008) A History of Modern Britain, London: Pan
Macmillan.
Arthur Miller (1994) ‘Tragedy and the Common Man’ in The
Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, London: Methuen.
Jane Milling (2012) Modern British Playwriting: The 1980s,
London: Methuen.
Sheridan Morley (1998) Review of Blood Brothers at Phoenix
Theatre, Spectator, 8 August.

101
102 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jim Mulligan (2005) Interview with Willy Russell, The Collected

Interviews of Jim Mulligan http://www.jimmulligan.co.uk/
interview/willy-russell-blood-brothers
John Murden (2006) ‘City of Change and Challenge: Liverpool
Since 1945’ in John Belchem (ed.) Liverpool 800: Culture,
Character and History, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Benedict Nightingale (1998) Review of Blood Brothers at Phoenix
Theatre, The Times, 30 July.
Paul du Noyer (2004) Liverpool Wondrous Place: Music from the
Cavern to the Coral, London: Virgin.
Jasper Rees (2010) ‘Willy Russell Interview’, Daily Telegraph, 24
March.
David Roper (1983) ‘Alive to the Sound of Music’, Daily Express,
14 April.
Willy Russell (1996) Plays: 1, London: Methuen.
Peter Taylor (1998) ‘Scouse Folk Opera’, The Independent, 30 July.
Jack Tinker (1988) Review of Blood Brothers at The Albery, Daily
Mail, 29 July.
Tim Walker (2009) ‘A Boost for Blood Brothers’, Sunday Telegraph,
20 November.
Irving Wardle (1983) ‘Twins Caught in a Fatal Trap’, The Times,
12 January.
Jade Wright (2013) Review of Blood Brothers at Liverpool Empire,
Liverpool Echo, 29 October.
 INDEX

accents, local 17, 57–8 character, see also specific

acting out/reading aloud 2, 93 characters by name
adaptations 12, see also schools character songs 50–1
version complexity 80
alienation effect 47, 76 minor characters (played by
analysing playwright’s technique narrator) 34–5, 47, 75
93–7 narrator 34–5, 75
anomaly, Blood Brothers as 17 revealed through actions 92
argument versus analysis 96–7 revealed through dialogue
Aristotle 44–5, 46, 67, 69, 91–2
77, 100 revealed through stage
audience connection 47–8, 49, directions 2
76, 81–2 Child Ballads 52
childhood
Bainbridge, Beryl 59–60 and guns 29
ballads 52 as theme 25–6
band (musical) 74–5, 80–1 of twins 5–7, 25–6
Billington, Michael 15–16, 17, 22 chorus (Ancient Greek tragedy)
Billy Elliot (Hall, 2000) 65–6 35, 57
birth of the twins 4–5 class, social
Bleasdale, Alan 66 costume 56
Bond, Chris 74, 76 Greek tragedy 46
Boys from the Blackstuff international productions 79
(Bleasdale, 1982) 66 language/accent 57
Brechtian dramatic technique in related works 64
46–8, 67, 76–7 as theme 20–2
‘Bright New Day’ 7, 50 colloquial language 57, 98
British Theatre 16 comedy 72
Burgess, John 45 Conservative governments 12–
15, see also Thatcherism
Cartwright, Jim 64–5 context 11–18, 97–9
catharsis 67 Corsican Brothers, The (Dumas,
Catholicism 20 1844) 44

103
104 INDEX

costume 34, 56–7, 83 Dumas, Alexander 44

critical reception 59–63 du Noyer, Paul 15
cyclical structure (play starts at
the end) 3, 18, 26–7, 47, ‘Easy Terms’ 5, 41, 51
71–2, 94 economics 17, see also
individualism (political);
dancing 27–8 unemployment
dates, identifying 3 Educating Rita (Russell, 1980)
death of twins 11, 27, 43, 50, 77 63–4
debt 4–5, 8, 51 education 32–3, 78
‘debt is a debt and must be paid’ Edward
4, 51, 52, 57 actor’s thoughts about 82–7
deceit 26–7, see also lies adulthood 9–11, 26
depression 5, 8, 10, 32, 41, 43 birth of 4–5
description versus analysis 95 character 32–4, 83–7
destiny/fate 5–6, 10, 18–19, 24, childhood 5–7, 21, 25–6
46, 94 costume 56–7
devil, warnings of 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, dancing 27
34–5, 57 death of 11, 27, 43, 50, 77
dialogue dreaming of escape 24
as evidence 91 innocence of 33
reading 1 language 57
Dickson, Barbara 53, 81 lies 26
dole (unemployment) 9–10, 13 and Linda 9, 40, 41, 85–6
Donna Marie 24, 42 and Mickey 8, 25–6, 31, 32
Dossor, Alan 73 move to the country 7
dramatic irony 67, 94 and Mr Lyons 43
dramatic technique and Mrs Johnstone 4–5, 22
analysing playwright’s songs 51
technique 93–7 teenage years 7–9
Brechtian 46–8 emotional connection with
costume 56–7 audience 47–8, 49, 76,
Greek tragedies 44–6 81–2
language 57–8 end, play starts at 3, 18, 26–7,
melodrama 48–9 47, 71–2, 94
music and song 49–53 epic theatre 46–8, 77
sets 53–6 episodic structure 67, 72–3
songs 48, 49–53, 76–7, 94 escape, dreams of 24–5
dreaming 24, 29 Everyman Theatre, Liverpool
duets 50 17, 73, 74, 81
 INDEX 105

evidence in the text, finding 90–2 Johnstone, Mrs, see Mrs

Johnstone
familiar, making strange the 47
fatalism 3, 19, 42, 60 ‘The Kids Song’ 52
fate and destiny 5–6, 10, 18–19, knifing 8, 38, 39
24, 46, 94
fathers (generally) 42–3, see also Labour governments 13–14
Mr Johnstone; Mr Lyons language
first person, (not) using 99 colloquial language 57, 98
folk music 18 dramatic technique 57–8
foreshadowing 6, 43, 52, 67 Edward’s versus Mickey’s
formal writing style 98–9 32, 33
fourth wall 47, 67 local accents 17
narrator speaking in verse 34
gauze 28 using dialogue as evidence 91
Gill, John 57 lies 5, 20, 26–7
Grant, Steve 60 lighting 48
Greek tragedies 35, 44–6, 77 ‘Light Romance’ 41, 51
guns Linda
foreshadowing 6, 43, 52 character 40–1
as motif 29–30 dancing 27
and Sammy 42 dreaming of escape 24
and Edward 9, 10, 40, 41,
Hall, Lee 65–6 85–6
Hall, Peter 15–16 first appearance 6
happiness and guns 29
dancing 27–8 lies 26
money 10–11, 22–3, 25–6, and Mickey 8, 9–10, 31, 40–1
33–4 pregnancy 9, 40–1
Henri, Adrian 17 linking device, narrator as 35
Littlewood, Joan 73, 76
‘I’m Not Saying a Word’ 50 Liverpool
individualism (political) 12–13, accent in the play 57–8
16–17 Everyman Theatre 17, 73,
international productions 12, 74, 81
77–81 and international
irony, dramatic 67, 94 productions 78–9
Liverpool Playhouse 12, 17,
Johnstone, Mickey, see Mickey 81, 97
Johnstone, Mr, see Mr Johnstone as scenery for play 55
106 INDEX

as setting for play 14–15, 97 songs 51

theatrical context 17–18, 81 teenage years 7–9, 31
Lloyd Webber, Andrew 16 Miller, Arthur 46
local accents 17, 57–8 Milling, Jane 64
locket 7, 8, 26, 33, 36, 38 mimesis 100
Logan, Brian 46, 49 Miners Strike 13
‘Lonely Sunday Afternoon/ My money
Friend’ 50 debt 4–5, 8, 51
love, and money 23 and happiness 10–11, 22–3,
low-key setting 17, 18 25–6
Lyons, Edward, see Edward and innocence 33
Lyons, Mr, see Mr Lyons and love 23
Lyons, Mrs, see Mrs Lyons and power 23
mood songs 51–3
Mackintosh, Cameron 16 morals, see themes
mannerisms 83–4 Morrison, Bill 17
Marilyn Monroe 10, 11, 28–9 motifs
‘Marilyn Monroe’ (song) 28, dancing 27–8
50, 53 definition 67
marriage 9–10 guns 29–30
McGough, Roger 17 Marilyn Monroe 28–9
McGrath, John 73, 76 Mr Johnstone 3, 27, 28, 42
melodrama 48–9, 77 Mr Lyons 6–7, 20, 42–3, 83
mental health 5, 8, see also Mrs Johnstone
depression birth of the twins 4–5
Mersey Poets 17 character of 35–7, 80
Mickey class stereotype 21
adulthood 9–11, 26, 31 confrontation with Mrs
birth of 4–5 Lyons 8, 27, 37, 38, 39
character 30–2 costume 56
childhood 5–7, 21, 25–6, 30 dancing 27
costume 56–7 deceit 26
dancing 27 dreaming of escape 24
death of 11, 27, 43, 50, 77 and money 23
dreaming of escape 24 in prologue 3
and Edward 8, 25–6, 31, 32 superstition 19
and guns 29 twins’ childhood 6, 25
language 57 twin’s teenage years 7–8
lies 26 Mrs Lyons
and Linda 6, 8, 9–10, 40–1 character 36, 37–9, 80
 INDEX 107

class stereotype 21 language 57

confrontation with as linking device 35
Mrs Johnstone 8, 27, 37, neutrality of 35
38, 39 playing other characters
costume 56 34–5, 47, 75
deceit 4, 26 production 34
dreaming of escape 24 songs 50, 51–2
fake pregnancy 4 and the subtext 35
language 57 verse 34
and Linda/Edward 10 nation divided, analogy of 21
and money 23 naturalistic theatre 46, 47, 68
songs 50 nature v nurture 21–2
superstition 19 neutrality 35
twins’ childhood 6, 25 non-naturalistic nature of Blood
twin’s teenage years 7–8 Brothers 46–7, 55–6
Mulligan, Jim 44 novels versus plays 100
multiple roles played by same
actors 34–5, 47, 75 Oliver! (Bart, 1960) 65
music, see also songs ‘One Summer’ 50
as dramatic technique 48, open stage 68, 74
49–53, 76–7, 94 oral tradition 18
mood music 51–3 ordinary people 17, 18
overture 51 Our Day Out (Russell, 1977) 64
role of musicians 74–5, 80–1 over-simplification, Blood
style and delivery 52–3 Brothers criticized for 49
musical theatre 16–17, 76
‘My Child’ 39 passive voice, using 99
mythical scope 77 Patten, Brian 17
personal response, developing
narrative songs 50 90
narrator Poetics (Aristotle) 44–5, 46, 67,
and audience connection 69, 77, 100
80–1 police 7, 21, 30, 31, 33
and Brechtian epic theatre 47 political context 12–15
building tension 4, 5, 8, 9 power, and money 23
character 34–5, 75 pregnancy
as chorus 45 Linda 9, 40–1
costume 34 Mrs Johnstone 4–5, 35
and the fourth wall 47 present tense, writing in 98–9
as herald of bad news 34–5 prison 10, 23, 27–8, 32, 42
108 INDEX

production history 11–12, 14, glossary definition 68

28, 74–5, 81 scenery 53–5
production notes 53, 55 setting 68
prologue 3, 68 seven, number 20
props 55 Shakespeare 72, 79, 81
shoes on the table 4, 6, 19,
quoting from the play 92–3 34, 38
social class, see class
Rees, Jasper 24 soliloquies 68, 94
related work 63–6 songs
religion 20 ballads 52
repetition 57, 67, see also motifs character songs 50–1
reviews of the play 59–63 dramatic technique 48,
Right to Buy 13 49–53, 76–7, 94
Road (Cartwright, 1986) 64–5 duets 50
round, theatre in the 68 mood songs 51–3
Russell, Willy 17–18 narrative songs 50
‘ordinary world’ songs 52
Sammy production history 12
audience response to 79–80 as soliloquies 68, 94
character 41–2 thematic songs 51
and guns 29, 42 song titles
and Linda 40 ‘Bright New Day’ 7, 50
and Mickey/Edward 5, 6, 10, ‘Easy Terms’ 5, 41, 51
25, 33 ‘I’m Not Saying a Word’ 50
prison 23 ‘The Kids Song’ 52
‘Say It’s Just Story’ 51 ‘Light Romance’ 41, 51
scenery 53–5 ‘Lonely Sunday Afternoon/
scenes My Friend’ 50
lack of marked scenes 3, ‘Marilyn Monroe’ 28, 50, 53
92–3 ‘My Child’ 39
no scene changes 53 ‘One Summer’ 50
parallel scenes 94–5 ‘Say It’s Just Story’ 51
schooling 8, 21 ‘Take a Letter Mrs Jones’
schools version 68, 75 52–3
secrecy 8, 26–7, see also lies ‘Tell Me It’s Not True’ 50,
sets 51, 77, 94
dramatic technique 47–8, ‘That Guy’ 32, 50, 85, 94
53–6 sound effects 52
gauze 28 South African adaptation 12
 INDEX 109

stage directions dreaming of escape 24–5

reading 1–2 fate and destiny 5–6, 10,
sound effects 52 18–19, 24, 46, 94
using as evidence 91 international appeal
Stanislavski, Constantin 68 of 77–8
Starlight Express 16–17 lies and secrecy 8, 26–7
Strasberg, Lee 28–9 money and happiness 10–11,
street scenes 53–4 22–3, 25–6
subtext 35, 68–9 nature v nurture 21–2
superstition superstition 4, 18–20
devil, warnings of 5, 6, 7, 8, in Willy Russell’s other
10, 34–5, 57 work 63
and Greek tragedy 45 time periods 3, 13–14, 56, 94
and Mrs Lyons 38 touring productions 12
and the narrator 34 Toxteth riots 15
shoes on the table 4, 6, 19, tragedy 44–6, 71–2, 77
34, 38 Treganna, Peter 82–7
as theme 4, 5, 6, 19–20 truth, revealing of 11, 26–7
swearing 57, 98 ‘twins separated at birth’
stories 44
‘Take a Letter Mrs Jones’ 52–3
Taylor, Peter 17 unemployment 9–10, 13, 14
teenage years 7–9 unfinished, play texts as 1
‘Tell Me It’s Not True’ 50, 51, unity of time and place 69, 72
77, 94
Thatcherism 12–13, 15, 16–17, verfremdungseffekt 47
64, 97 verse (narrator) 34
‘That Guy’ 32, 50, 85, 94
theatrical context 15–18 Walford, Glen 3, 36, 77–82
thematic songs 51 Wardle, Irving 21, 34, 52
themes well made plays 69
childhood, growing up and West End run 12
friendship 25–6 Winter of Discontent 13–14
class 18–19, 20–2 Wright, Jade 98
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