Critical evaluation †blood brothers Essay

The play did not open with the curtain going up but instead with the lights going up. My seat was in the gallery, which is quite high up, but after I got over the sense of vertigo my view of the play was fine. I could not see the gantry at the back of the stage or the very front of the stage, but very little of the action took place in these areas. The play was written in the early 1960’s by the Liverpudlian playwright Willy Russell and was first performed in the early 1980’s. The play is a ‘slice of life’, or an impression of life starting in Liverpool in the early 1960’s through until the 1980’s, of poor working class families. The play combines music and song with narrative. The set of Blood Brothers consisted of, on either side of the stage a row of terraced house fronts. At the back of the stage there was a gantry which was used by the narrator and once by Mrs. Johnston when she sang a song that was an overview of the action that had just taken place, there was a countryside backcloth with two moveable ‘brick wall’ flats which moved across to cover this. The set was very appropriate for the play, it combined well with the ‘slice of life’. The props were minimalist and brought on stage by the actors. There were four moveable flats, two that slid across the floor and two that came down from the ceiling. All the costumes and fixings were appropriate for the era of the play, they worked well together producing a realistic setting. The play opens with the twin brothers, lying down on stretchers and then being carried away. The narrator then informs the audience of the events that have just happened and then the play begins. The play is about Mrs. Johnston, a working class mother of seven children who after her husband has left her for a younger woman discovers she is pregnant with twins. Mrs. Johnston is a cleaner who works for a middle class couple, Mr. and Mrs. Lyons. Mrs. Johnston tells Mrs. Lyons of her predicament and so Mrs. Lyons who can not have children of her own and whose husband has gone away on business for six months offers to take one of the twins for herself and bring him up as her own. After some persuasion Mrs. Johnston gives one of the boys to Mrs. Lyons. She finds it difficult to keep Mrs. Johnston on as her cleaner because she can see that there is a bond between mother and child and so fires her. Several years pass, the boys are now seven, nearly eight, they meet when out playing, become great friends and ‘Blood Brothers’. Both Mrs. Johnston and Mrs. Lyons try to keep the boys apart but are unable to do so. In a desperate attempt to separate the boys the Lyons move to a house in the country well away from Mickey and the estate where the Johnston’s live. A few years later the council decide to demolish the estate where the Johnston’s live and relocate the families to the countryside close to where the Lyons now live. Mickey has a girlfriend, Linda, a girl he has known since childhood. One day when they are out walking they come across Eddie, (Mickey’s twin), and rekindle their friendship. The twins are now sixteen years old and their friendship continues to grow until it is time for Eddie to gone away to university. However Eddie declares his love for Linda before leaving but she continues her relationship with Mickey and soon falls pregnant with his child and so they marry and move into Mickey’s home. Mickey’s older brother, Sammy, gets into trouble and Mickey agrees to help him out but instead ends up taking the fall for Sammy killing a man and goes to prison for seven years. During this time he becomes depressed and withdrawn from Linda. She turns to Eddie for support and they soon become emotionally attached. When Eddie’s mother becomes aware of the romance she tells Mickey who, now out of prison, goes to Eddie’s work place. Mrs. Johnston now feels she must tell the boys that they are brothers but this is too much for Mickey to understand in his present mental state, distressed and confused he shoots Eddie. Just as Mickey is doing this a policeman takes aim and fires killing Mickey. Both men are dead. On the whole the script and the play were very good. At first it took a little time to get in to the play but it soon flowed naturally. The play held the audience’s interest by the use of the narrator who appeared on the stage behind the action and would burst into song. A lot of information was given on the characters through the use of song, so the audience received much of the necessary information without realising it. The part of Mrs. Johnston was played by the singer and actress Dennis Nolan. Ms. Nolan described the history of her character through the song ‘Just like Marilyn Monroe’. Her story is not extraordinary or uncommon. A girl from a Roman Catholic working class family who falls in love with a young man who takes her dancing and says she ‘looks a lot like Marilyn Monroe’. Romance soon fades once the babies start arriving. Possibly because of her faith, which would have instilled a belief that children are a blessing, she soon has a large family and her husband begins to look elsewhere for what he first found attractive in his wife. He begins to go dancing with a girl who he says ‘looks a lot like Marilyn Monroe’. When he leaves home Mrs. Johnston discovers she is pregnant with the twins of the story. This is when the events that lead up to the final tragedy really begin. Mickey is the twin that Mrs. Johnston kept. He grows up in this very poor working class family but as a child is mainly happy and full of mischief. He does not expect an easy life and accepts who he is and what his future will be. He does not expect to go to university like his friend Eddie because in his mind and at this time it was usually only children from better off families who went. Mickey would have been happy to work and bring up his children in a working class family. It is unemployment and bad choices that take away his pride and his future. He becomes very depressed, feels worthless and finally sees his marriage fall apart. The actor who played Mickey had to act the part of a child through to an adult, his mannerisms were very good and his gestures appropriate for the different ages. When he was seven Mickey acted and moved as if he was seven and when he was twenty he acted and moved like a twenty year old. His voice changed as well, it moved from a high quick voice to a deeper more solemn one. Linda is the childhood friend of Mrs. Johnston’s children and especially of Mickey. The two children grow up together, play together and become girl and boyfriend. This relationship is threatened by Linda’s attraction to Eddie, Mickey’s twin, but although she realises that it is Eddie that she loves she does not end her relationship with Mickey. When Eddie goes away to university she becomes pregnant with Mickey’s child and marries him. Linda’s role in the play is huge, it is her relationship with Eddie which finally destroys Mickey and leads to the final tragedy. The play contained quite a lot of swearing but this was only used to aid the script and made it more realistic. At the end of the play many people in the audience were in tears which showed how good the performances had been. As a straight play this would have been a very sad story of some very hard lives but because the story is told partly in song the mood is much lighter. It shows that there can be laughter in even the most difficult of lives, but also how our own upbringing, superstitions and prejudices can make our lives more complicated and more difficult.