Right from the start, there’s a sense that the dice are loaded against the protagonists of Willy Russell’s inarguably popular Blood Brothers, returning to Manchester’s Palace Theatre in a touring production after more than four decades of unbroken success.  

Dramatically, as its premonitory opening spells out, their cards are marked by the lineaments of tragedy in a specifically Shakespearian sense. After all, at its heart is the tale of two star-crossed brothers, Mickey and Eddie; twins, sundered by the houses into which they have been divided. One home terraced, the other comfortably detached, their fates are mapped out equally clearly by the coordinates of their respective stations in the class system. Peculiarly, however, given Russell’s own working-class roots, it is the broader strokes of the more traditional tragedian structure which carry the greater part of the musical’s emotional heft.  

Originally developed at the beginning of the 1980s, the intervening years have, perhaps, softened the more abrasive edges of its original urgency, so that it has come to take on something of the quality of a period piece. Just as its own characters hark back in song to the cinema of Marilyn Monroe, so the musical now evokes a decade whose sharp divisions have been blunted by the diminishing lens of nostalgia’s rear view mirror. Moreover, as societal attitudes have changed, so some of the play’s less nuanced depictions, of mental health and prescription drug misuse in particular, now appear to teeter precariously on the tightrope between clumsiness and parody.  

In line with this, in some respects, the production feels more assured in its first act, further away in time, and better suited to the largeness of life that the musical form thrives on. Reminiscent in some respects of Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills, in which adult actors took on the roles of children, its whistle-stop alacrity sweeps the audience along at a fast enough clip to ensure that any disbelief they might harbour about the driving plot contrivance, in which a working-class single mother and her childless employer forge a contract born out of desperation and maintained by superstition, remains suspended.  

That it continues to be so in the musical’s quieter moments requires a performance of absolute conviction in the role of Mrs Johnstone, the woman who gives up a child, and in this respect Vivienne Carlyle acquits herself magnificently. While the verisimilitude of the plot may falter, she unfailingly hits the right note of emotional truth. Very nearly her equal in the trickier role of the Narrator, a figure with all the caprice and ambivalence of the Old Testament God before paternity tempered him, is Scott Anson, by turns diabolical and tender. Their duet on the song Easy Terms is a wonderful example of the musical’s power to compress theme and emotion, spelling out with a subtlety that nonetheless hits home the series of Faustian pacts required by those who live hand-to-mouth merely to exist day to day.  

Its second act counterpart, Take A Letter, Miss Jones, takes the same melodic scalpel to the dispassionate practicalities of hiring and firing, paring back the rib cage to expose the heartlessness of management models which treat humans as resources. For me, these were the moments when Blood Brothers lived up to its reputation, and played out in the present moment.  

From the ovation the opening night audience bestowed on it, however, it’s clear that, for the majority, Blood Brothers has withstood the test of time. I’d argue that, with a little more in the way of ambition and a renewed commitment to nuance, the behemoth of a box-office hit might even be cajoled into moving with it once more. 

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: Sean Jones and Joe Sleight, Blood Brothers UK Tour 2024. Photo Credit Jack Merriman.

 

Blood Brothers is at the Palace Theatre, Manchester until November 30, 2024. For more information, click here.