Blood Brothers, Festival Theatre

Published on Tuesday 3 February 2009 08:53

Blood Brothers **** Festival Theatre WHILE snow blanketed most of the UK last night – and the cast from Tons of Money, playing at the King's Theatre, spent the evening on a train stuck in it – Blood Brothers returned to the Festival Theatre with a hot-blooded blast of passion and a contemporary resonance that goes far beyond a few snowflakes.

There's no denying that Blood Brothers is a powerful piece of musical theatre. It has to be – after all the whole plot is revealed in its opening line. It is an enduring one too, that has grown and changed since Willy Russell first staged it some 25 years ago.

It's the story of Johnstone twins, separated at birth and doomed to die on the self same day. It is more than that, however. It's the story of two Liverpool families, one large and poor, the other small and privileged, and how they survive the changing decades from the Fifties to the Seventies.

At its heart is Mrs Johnstone, the young woman with her seven kids who is abandoned by her man when she falls pregnant again. She cleans for rich but childless Mrs Lyons, who is rattling around in her big house while her husband is away running his factories. When she hears that Mrs Johnstone is expecting twins, Mrs Lyons' plan is obvious.

Besides bringing a strong and expressive voice to the role, Maureen Nolan ensures that Mrs Johnstone's dilemma of whether to keep her son or let him go is brought to the front of the opening scenes. While Tracy Spencer finds in Mrs Lyons all the fears and anxieties of a childless woman given the possibility of adoption.

It is on these two brilliantly realised emotional performances that the production's success is laid. It creates the fear which the otherwise-loving Mrs Johnstone has of telling her own Micky and Mrs Lyons' Eddie the truth, by a layer of superstition that crowds through the whole piece.

There's real violence in there too. It is first seen in the childhood games of cowboys and Indians acted out with a fine attention to detail by Sean Jones as Mickey and Anna Sambrooks as his childhood sweetheart Linda. It continues through elder brother Sammy's flirtation with gun culture.

If such a strand seems tragically relevant today, the biggest resonance comes as they face recession and redundancy. The forms of debt might have changed, but the ultimate result is the same.

As the show has toured over the years, minor additions and changes have kept it fresh. Unfortunately there are just too many of them now. While they all work individually, together they make it a tad too long.

Otherwise, this is a powerful production which finds emotion and real humanity deep in its heart.

Run ends 14 February