BLOOD BROTHERS

Photos: Jack Merriman

It’s 1983 and I am 27 years old, sat in the Lyric Theatre in the West End waiting to see a new show by Liverpool writer Willy Russell. In the lead role is Barbara Dickson and playing her twin sons are George Costingan and Andrew C Wadsworth. It was the start of a life long love of what I still believe to be the best British musical of all time. It won best new musical that year but despite that it failed to enjoy a long run. Then some years later the brilliant Bill Kenwright, also Liverpudlian, revived it and launched it on a path that sees it still on tour to this day.

It’s now 2026 and I am considerably older, you can work it out, and I am sat nervously waiting to see the show for what will be my fifteenth time. I’ve seen it with many casts, and always left in tears. There have been an amazing number of brilliant Mrs Johnstones over the years. Barbara Dickson remains my favourite and if I listen to the recording it is always her version that I choose, but over the years four of the Nolan sisters have played the part, Kiki Dee, Clodagh Roger’s, (remember her?) and my favourite the brilliant Lyn Paul. Yes, okay I am a super-fan!

This time round the role is being played by Vivienne Carlyle and she is simply excellent and she is excellent because this is a role in a show where every song has to be not just belted out but acted. This woman can do both, she brings the character truly to life, totally believable. There is another reason why I love this piece, it has to be sung with regional accents. Willy Russell’s writing has the poetry of the scouse accent and if you even dare to try belting out those songs with the ubiquitous mid-Atlantic twang of so much modern musical theatre it simply looses its beauty. It’s one of the reasons I love the show and one of the things I dislike so much about shows like Six.

This time round the role of Mrs Lyons is played by Laura Harrison and she too delivers the part with an authentically clipped tone, the slightly posh northerner, it’s a heartbreaking part in what is essentially a Greek tragedy.

Richard Munday’s narrator is scarily still, a powerful performance backed again by a stunning voice. Sammy is the terrifying older brother and Michael Gillette is, forgive me, razor sharp in his delivery of the part, loping around the stage threateningly as a child and later as the adult.

Much of the joy of this piece comes from the cast of  adults charged with playing youngsters from seven to teenage before reaching and adulthood that seems now to be forced on them by circumstances way too soon. Gemma Brodrick is a real delight as Linda, and at every stage from childhood through adolescence to motherhood, truly believable despite having some of the best comedy moments in the whole.

And this, despite being a tragedy, is deeply comic and that comedy demands immaculate timing.

Timing is just one of the talents on display from Sean Jones, I’ve seen him in role the several times and he is every inch Mickey, the quality of his characterisation, his physicality, his swing from vibrant kid to embarrassed teen and eventually depressed adult is so very moving, and his delivery of those songs is perfect, sung in a way that only a great actor can. Costigan was good, very good but Jones is brilliant.

Twin brother Edward is played by Joe Sleight and played with sparkling innocence. Some of us will remember Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills in which adults played kids. Sleight brings to Blood Brothers memories of that piece but also brings something for me that is really special. The role of Eddie has some of the best musical moments in the score, but in recent productions I have come away disappointed that some of those scorchingly high tops notes have been skipped or even missed. Sleight hits every one and hits them with ease. The Kenwright production in my view has always rounded out and knocked some of the sharp corners off the original, but last night his performance felt like they were restored.

The whole is dependent on a fine ensemble playing multiple roles, playground games, the grim realities of Thatcherite Britain, dole queues, Giros, funfairs when little was either fun or fair.

Andy Walmsley’s set has always worked but this time looked like it has had a lick of paint and is rather too glossy but the costumes are so so well observed, I remember so well the schoolgirls of my teens hiking their uniform skirts so high that they could almost be seen as belts.

I could sit through it again and again and I hope I can when it returns – which I am sure it will!

Andrew Kay

10 February

Theatre Royal Brighton

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