Review: Blood Brothers

On its return to Derry-Londonderry, Willy Russell's Blood Brothers comes across as Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life beautifully transposed onto the template of the straight musical: a dark, depressing, ambitious but also lively and funny look at the most relatable themes in and around the lives of both upper and working class families.

Superbly performed, sung and staged from start to finish, Bob Tomson and Bill Kenwright's production earns the loud applause of the Millennium Forum audience through a cavalcade of catchy, pointed and poignant musical numbers, witty scripting and skilled emoting.


The theatrical world of Blood Brothers, set in Liverpool and penned in the early 1980s, is one where sets, props and costumes are simple but effective. For we are not judging the characters on what they wear and where they live, but what they do and how they behave. Therein lies the brilliance and the heart of Willy Russell, recently shown on the Northern Ireland stage in Educating Rita; another production about the attempted bridging of class gaps by overcoming, or trying to overcome, conflicts of differences and similarities.


For the uninitiated, the story revolves around twins separated at birth by a pact between a working class mother with many children, Mrs Johnstone (Lyn Paul, brilliantly matriarchal), and an upper class mother with no children, Mrs Lyons (Sarah Jane Buckley, superb). The latter illegally adopts – in other words, buys – one of the boys born to Mrs Johnstone, and both mothers do their best to prevent either boy learning the truth about their origins, but to no avail, with the twins re-uniting as friends and the titular "Blood Brothers" before the age of eight despite their class divisions.

From that moment on, the audience enjoys and endures the pleasures of childhood imagination, the difficulties with teenage courtship, the short-term joys and long-term complications of youthful marriage, even births and deaths – from multiple points-of-view. It's an enormous undertaking for a play, let alone a popular musical, but this cast and crew, aided by their exceptional source material, master it.

Numbers such as "Marilyn Monroe" (three times over), "Take A Letter, Miss Jones" and showstopper "Tell Me It's Not True" are delivered with intimate, expressive vigour and zest, and "Bright New Day" is a sparky interlude. But, for this viewer, the highlight of Blood Brothers is the chemistry between the brothers themselves.

There's Mickey (Sean Jones), the working class co-ed, and Eddie (Joel Benedict), the public schoolboy, who looks like he's stumbled off the Chariots Of Fire set into the Ken Loach musical drama that Mickey and the boys' future love interest Linda (Danielle Corlass) have found themselves in.

All characters are played by the same actors right through to adulthood in a casting move that wondrously shows off the versatility of this talented trio. While Sean Jones' conveyance of the joys and pains of Mickey's journey stands out above all, Danielle Corlass is also fantastic as the young woman forced to grow up and assume responsibility sooner than she would have wanted. And Joel Benedict is remarkable at expressing the carefree and caring facets that emerge in the potentially stuck-up Eddie through friendship. In this regard, his (and Corlass's) performance of "I'm Not Saying A Word" is more touching than troubling, an act of sympathy and companionship from one of many in the Forum who desire the happy ending that we know will come for no one in this unforgettable and enthralling musical.

Simon Fallaha

Blood Brothers runs at the Millennium Forum, Derry-Londonderry, until Saturday October 8.