BLOODY TALE CASTS CLASS AS THE VILLAIN
There’s a quote in the programme, by Gary Barlow, that ‘Rebecca Storm is Theatre Royalty — fantastic.’ And it’s hard to deny it when you hear her soaring into Mrs Johnstone’s lament, Tell Me It’s Not True, in the hyperemotional, gut-wrenching finale to Blood Brothers. She’s there throughout the show of course, singing Easy Terms and variations on the doleful Marilyn Monroe ditty, that starts as an amusing comment on her flighty husband and becomes progressively more ominous as fate works itself out in the show.
Her performance would have sounded even better if it didn’t have amplification that provided an ear-aching, word-and-sounddistorting din, accompanied by a band that often drowned dialogue and song.
Willie Russell’s writing is quite unapologetically political and melodramatic, but the show is written in an economical style, laced with rough, bawdy humour and it’s directed with the kind of smooth movement that keeps everything moving briskly. It may have been the abrasive sound that made the Greekchorus-like narrator seem not just cynical, but more aggressively political than I remember him from previous productions.
The perpetually hard-up Mrs Johnstone, deserted by her husband, with seven children and twins on the way, has been inveigled into handing over one of her new-born twins to the well-off, childless Mrs Lyons. The two boys are brought up in hugely different social surroundings. Nobody is ever to know the facts. It’s a pact with the devil of course, that’s bound to come undone in the best traditions of Greek tragedy, and the show is littered with references to superstitions heaping psychological pressure on the two women.
The narrator (Robbie Scotcher) is a constant presence commenting on the inexorable doom that’s facing everybody, reminding us that the day of reckoning looms.
The show touches on class, unemployment, drug dependency, love, hopes and dreams, while posing the eternal question about the relative importance of nature or nurture. Mickey (Alexander Patmore), the twin brought up by his mother, is a stereotypical happy-go-lucky, boisterous Liverpudlian working-class kid. His brother Eddie (Joel Benedict), becomes an equal stereotype, posh, well-spoken
‘It’s a powerful piece of theatre... and the songs stick in your head’
and naïve, shielded from the corrupting influence of the Johnstone children, yet attracted to their vitality and lured by it into the terrible finale. But those Johnstone kids are not all cute and lovable. The eldest, Sammy is a nasty bit of goods, although the show points the finger at his environment.
It’s a powerful piece of theatre, and the songs, with their repetitive mournful refrains, have the knack of sticking in your head long after the show is over, but the first act could do with losing the Mickey/Eddie Long Sunday Afternoon duet that elongates without elucidating.
Willie Russell doesn’t sit on the fence about the resulting tragedy. While the narrator haunts all sides, he spells out the message that class is the real villain of the piece.