In the year when Willy Russell's musical Blood Brothers celebrates it's 20th anniversary on London's West end stage, impresario Bill Kenwright has taken the show on tour.
It sounds like a recipe for a theatrical disaster; a show about twins separated at birth which opens with a pair of dead bodies and a grieving mother on stage.
Yet in the year when Willy Russell's musical Blood Brothers celebrates it's 20th anniversary on London's West end stage, impresario Bill Kenwright has taken the show on nationwide tour with a play that at one point was playing both in West End Theatres and on national tour at the same time, as well as spending two years on Broadway from 1993, racking up six Tony Award nominations in the process.
Blood Brothers is the story of a working class mother of six, Mrs Johnstone, whose husband abandons her while she is pregnant. When they learn that she is carrying twins, and she faces the possibility of losing some or all of her children to social services, her employer, the childless Mrs Lyons offers to adopt one of the children.
But when she takes custody of Edward, Mrs Lyons sacks Mrs Johnstone, and refuses to have anything to do with her, even moving away when she cannot stop the children becoming sworn friends, despite their differences in background. They are reunited in adolesence, by which time Mickey -- the son Mrs. Johnstone has kept -- has become smitten with Linda. And then Eddie falls for Linda as well....
Blood Brothers is stridently left-wing, sharing many of the themes of Russell's most famous story, Educating Rita, of the working class oppressed from cradle to grave; it is overly-simplistic and in many ways deeply patronizing, ignoring any influence of heredity, stipulating that only environment matters -- in that respect, it is the opposite of Educating Rita. It is of course, polemic, so balance is not a pre-requisite.
It is also gloriously bombastic and wildly over the top in a way that would be appreciated of Jim Steinman's fans.
But there is no denying the power of the recurring strains of 'Marilyn Monroe,' and the shows two other recurring numbers, 'Easy Terms,' a title that is both deeply resonant and wonderfully multi-faceted, and the most famous number, the show-stopping 'Tell Me It's Not True.'
The Liverpool setting runs deep through-out the play, both in the scenery, with it's romaticized star-lit backdrop of Liverpool docks in the 1960s, and the way the scouse dialect runs through almost every line, from easy terms through superstitions such as new shoes on the table bringing bad luck.
It is a play that as well as making demands of its audience in understanding the dialect and perhaps unfamiliar context, also makes huge demands of its cast. Although Linda Nolan (in the version that played at Bath's Theatre Royal) as Mrs Johnston and the ever-present narrator whose rhyming couplets frame each scene and create a sinister sense of foreboding dominate the play, it is the parts of Mickey and Linda that are most demanding. By contrast, Eddie, the twin brought up by rich parents is compartively one-dimensional, but only in comparison to Mickey and Linda -- the part is still stretching. But the script requires the same actors play the parts of seven-year old children, teenage lovers, and a couple prematurely aged, with Mickey in a withdrawl-fulled paranoia by the end, and if Stephen Palfreman rises superbly to the demands of Mickey, Nicola Daley is a revelation as the sassy Linda, worn down by the end by her love.
It is those stories that make most demands of their audiences that are the most rewarding, and the play climaxed to rapturous acclaim from audiences, with standing ovations and eyes wiped clear of tears amongst both cast and theatre-goers.
