Blood Brothers: The Musical – Review

Blood Brothers was Willy Russell’s first ever musical. Written in 1983, it has become the third longest-running musical in West End history: that’s beginner’s luck, I guess. The show opens with a dark, slow scene, illuminated by the twinkling lights of a city, creating an unavoidable sense of foreboding that overshadows the rest of the musical, even in the funny moments. It’s therefore not a spoiler to tell you that the twins die, and the tragedy lies not so much in their deaths as in the story that leads up to them.

This musical is unique in that one of the characters is simply ‘narrator’, played by Kristofer Harding. He is not so much a narrator as a conscience-slash-devil figure, who parades the stage at every opportunity, often hounding two of the three lead women, Mrs Johnstone and Mrs Lyons, for whom he is a figment of their imaginations and a reminder of their regrettable past. Or he lurks in the upper levels of the set, malevolently overlooking the on-stage action. Kristofer Harding’s voice is magnificent, but inevitably overlooked because the very nature of his role as a permanent background character. His role is perhaps my favourite part of the musical, as it embodies the class struggles supposedly driving the

plot, and gives the audience something real to pinpoint the tragedy upon. The story revolves around Mrs Johnstone, played by Maureen Nolan, who is the fourth Nolan sister to play the leading role in Blood Brothers. Mrs Johnstone, abandoned by her husband for a younger woman (who looks a bit like Marilyn Monroe), and pregnant with her umpteenth child, is worrying about how she will afford to feed all of her children on her salary as a housemaid for a middle class couple, the Lyons. When the doctor announces that she is in fact expecting twins, Mrs Johnstone expresses her worry to her employer, who is unable to have children, and Mrs Lyons asks to keep one of the twins when they’re born. Mrs Johnstone agrees, considering the comfortable and prosperous future of the child she gives away, and though she quickly regrets her decision, is unable to take it back.

Mrs Lyons could easily be portrayed as the villain of the piece, but in reality she is a lonely woman with a busy husband, repressed by her class values and stifled by an irreconcilable insecurity of her adopted son’s love for her. I disagree with the plot’s notion that a woman need to have children to be complete and fulfilled, but I guess that’s just a sign of the times. And perhaps, if you look into it more deeply, Mrs Lyons’ acquisition of a son actually doesn’t make her happy.

The performance of Sean Jones and Joel Benedict as Mickey and Eddie, the twins, is phenomenal. Despite being fully grown adults, the two act out such a realistic depiction of children that, when they grow up, and the toy guns they played with are replaced with real guns, you still see them as innocent little boys playing in the street. This is what makes their death so raw and painful for the audience: they’re still just children to us.

Within the plot, Willy Russell includes an interesting contemporary narrative of psychiatry and anti-depressant drugs. In the song Marilyn Monroe 3, Mrs Johnstone sings of Mickey: “his mind’s gone dancing…a prescription note the doctor wrote for the chronically depressed…he treats his ills with daily pills,” except those pills “stop his mind from dancing”. This is followed by a hard discussion between Mickey and his wife, Linda, about whether he needs the pills or not, and Mickey is adamant he needs them, purely because the doctor said so. This scene disputes the necessity of anti-depressants, suggesting that they do little but distance the person from the world, and offers a generally negative view of the drugs.

I can’t stress how emotionally taxing and utterly fantastic this musical is, and it is guaranteed to reduce even the coldest people to tears: the woman in front of me was liberally handing out tissues to everyone around her. I’ve seen a fair few musicals, and I’ve never seen a standing ovation as immediate and unhesitant as I saw on Saturday night. Blood Brothers is well known for its regular standing ovations, and I think in this particular instance, it is due to Maureen Nolan’s heart-breaking rendition of ‘Tell me it’s not true’ in which her voice breaks and the tears are surprisingly real (she is actually still crying when she comes back on for the final bow). The Nolans have had their share of heartbreaks, and I think this is self-evident in the powerful ending of this incredible musical.

This show will make you laugh at its best slapstick humour, including a judge with an awkward erection, and weep in equal measures. If you ever get the chance, I urge you to see this musical without hesitation. It is by far one of the best you will ever watch.