BLOOD BROTHERS: Russell: touring production

BLOOD BROTHERS: Willy Russell
Runs: 2h 45m, touring production
Review: Rod Dungate, Malvern Theatres, 3 April 2002

It's not perfect, but what does that matter? The show has just about everything.BLOOD BROTHERS is coming up for something like 20 years continuous performances and it has lost none of its appeal. It is a simple story twin brothers parted at birth and reunited with tragic consequences and (for a musical) is simply staged: there's a fluid mix of music, acting and lights. It's not perfect the music is not particularly gripping and some of Russell's rhymes are dreadful - but none of this matters, because the show has just about everything.

It has melodrama, comedy, life and death, class struggle, rosy reminiscence. In structure it is even a brother (a blood brother perhaps) to Greek tragedy a fateful act sets in train a course of events that can only be cleansed in death. Russell's narrator (tough-guy John Payton), more like a one-man Greek chorus, strengthens this notion.

The playwright's enormous skill is that he does not stick the elements together cynically but that he has the knack of knowing how to make a popular show work. It works because Russell knows what he wants to say, and like a brilliant pub raconteur, he understands just how to hold your attention

The show is certainly sentimental but it never becomes banal. Underpinning the play is the divisive indeed destructive influence of class and money. The twin brothers (Mickey, brought up poor, and Eddie, brought up rich) form a childhood friendship the do now know they are brothers. We see it cannot grow into maturity once Eddie goes to university and Mickey is made redundant: the gulf becomes too wide and Eddie's privilege only makes it deeper. This is the play's tragedy the deaths are a fitting and necessary theatrical conclusion.

The other great asset of the show is Russell's and his cast's ability to let every telling moment register the idea of parting the twins as babies, giving the baby away, becoming blood brothers, a mother giving her son a keepsake because he doesn't know her. The actors sustain these with honesty and conviction and they work a treat.

Lyn Paul (Mrs Johnstone, the mother) is in fine singing and acting voice throughout. She exudes wholesome goodness without becoming schmaltzy. Jacqui Charlesworth (Mrs Lyons, mother who adopts) engages our sympathy in a tricky role.

Paul Crosby and Mark Hutchinson (twins Mickey and Eddie) cannot avoid dollops of saccharine as 7 year olds but then this fault really lies with Russell's writing and the directors. As the characters grow into adolescence and young adulthood and the actors can relax a bit, they become truly moving.

Russell's politics are not absent: much of this Mickey carries, Crosby carries it all off with aplomb.

Cast

Mrs Johnstone: Lyn Paul
Narrator: John Payton
Mickey: Paul Crosby
Eddie: Mark Hutchinson
Mrs Lyons: Jacqui Charlesworth
Linda: Hayley Jayne Spencer
Sammy Peter Washington
Mr Lyons: Tim Churchill
Policeman/ Teacher: David Rudd
Donna Marie/ Miss Jones: Nicola Rutherford
Perkins: Adam Knight
Neighbour: Richard Munday
Brenda: Emma Reyes
Bus Conductor: Mark Lawson

Director: Bob Tomson, Bill Kenwright
Design: Andy Walmsley
Production Musical Director: Rod Edwards
Musical Director: Karl Pendlebury
Lighting: Nick Richings
Sound: Ben Harrison

2002-04-04 09:00:27