Written by Willy Russell

Directed by Bob Thomson

Review by Marina Funcasta

Tickets from £13.00

For a play that is all about the perils of nostalgia, Bob Tomson’s touring production of ‘Blood Brothers’ felt painfully relevant: framed throughout by two council estates, there is no attempt to dampen down the bleak series of events which compose Russell’s notorious tragedy. Decidedly exposing, Tomson makes use of the Playhouse’s generous Proscenium Arch, opening his world up for public scrutiny or, indeed, engrossment.

To be sure, the show’s uncanny reverberations were more a result of Willy Russell’s script than Andy Walmsey’s purist design. Especially in the first half, the 50s Liverpudlian landscape was almost tangible: from the milkman to the ‘Everton FC’ graffiti, Walmsey’s precision felt unforced. Cosy in its homeliness, even despite its unabridged misery, the world inhabited by the poorer Johnstone twin, along with his mother, performed with impressive emotional pragmatism and potency by Vivienne Carlyle, stood out in its construction. The washing line addition, though at times pantomimical, nevertheless was a nice addition, rooting those scenes firmly in the mid-century kitchen sink.

Colouring in the world around them, the production gained the most traction when the ‘children’ arrived. The entourage provided an unfelt vitality; until this point, the production felt mildly silent – as if it were holding back. Although retrospectively, this makes sense, seeing as the temporal structure of the script would stagger the characters’ emotional freedom, there was nevertheless an issue with the mics or sound more generally, which meant that even when Carlyle strove for explosivity, she landed flat or overly choreographed. Combined with the unfamiliarity of the accent, some words/lyrics were missed.

Even so, ‘Blood Brothers’ promised eeriness definitely did not fail to land. Crucial to this has always been the Narrator, played with an adumbrated wistfulness by Scott Anson, even if his lines were also hit-or-miss. Our leads, luckily, did not have this issue: speaking with excellent vocal clarity, Sean Jones and Joe Sleight demonstrated admirable endurance as our Mickey and Eddie, respectively. Jones, in particular, stood out in his vocal malleability, bringing many to tears in numbers “Long Sunday Afternoon/My Best Friend” and his hopeless meekness during “Marilyn Monroe 3”.

In truth, the fourth act is when the play felt most alive, spotlighting a lost, wandering Mickey lost in a labyrinthine 1980s Liverpool; life seeming unchangeable and inevitable builds from a nihilism I fear many of our audience members are familiar with, capturing a zeitgeist is tricky, but Tomson’s production pursues in the right direction.

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