The play Blood Brothers by Willy Russell is set in 1980s Britain and deals with themes of fate, social class, and the divisions they create. It follows twin brothers separated at birth, with one adopted by a wealthy family and the other remaining with his poor mother. As the play progresses, the genre shifts from comedy to tragedy as the brothers' lives diverge and tragedy ensues. The actors effectively portrayed the social and emotional impacts of class through their characterizations, helping the audience understand the themes.

1. Blood Brother
Blood Brother Performance Essay On the 14TH June 2012, we watched Blood Brothers, by Willy
Russell, at the Phoenix Theatre. The play 'Blood Brothers' is set in 1980s Britain; it deals with
numerous themes such as fate, the class system, insanity, superstition and division. The genres of the
play are drama, tragedy & comedy–to an extent. Something I found particularly interesting was
how the genre of comedy became less and less apparent as the play went on, whereas the genre of
tragedy– became more and more apparent as the play went on–the opposite. The play was a musical.
I didn't have any expectations of the play prior to watching it, as I believe art and especially
performance art revolves around an experience, a new experience,...show more content...
Her adaptation of voice is ensuingly, hugely responsible for her overall characterisation of Miss
Johnston being so phenomenal. Through this characterisation, Miss Johnston made several of the
themes more understandable. An example of when the actress's' characterization was particularly
effective was towards the end, during the scene of Mickey & Edwards death, when she
revealed to them, they were brothers. When she did this, her eyes welled up with tears, her voice
trembled and her body convulsed; my eyes were fixed on her. I believed her, so much that I began
to feel great sympathy for her. She was able to portray an emotion, and cause it to the same
emotion, to be evoked by the audience. Mrs Lyons was played exceptionally well; she helped me to
understand several themes of the play–primarily class. Mrs Lyons was of a higher class, than Miss
Johnston and this came through, through her movement–the manner in which, she manoeuvred
around the stage. Mrs Lyons–unlike Miss Johnston would always walk with her head held high in
the air and her shoulders back; her posture was always sustained and sharp, apart from when she
began to derail mentally. Very often Mrs Lyons, would be alongside Miss Johnston
–who was of a
working class background, and through the actress' characterization, I was able to see a contrast
between the two women. This helped me to understand the theme of class. When Mrs Lyons began
to derail
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2. Blood Brothers Overview Essay
Blood Brothers Overview
Blood Brothers tells the story of twin bothers who are born into a large working class family from
Liverpool called the Johnston's. Due to financial problems and threats from the welfare to take the
family into care, Mrs Johnston decides to have one of the twins adopted into the Lyons family, (a
rich upper–class family who are unable to have children). The play looks at the differences and
conflicts in their upbringings, their relationships to each other and those around them, and their real
and adopted mothers.
The essential way we went about working on it was this. We would start off by reading the passage
we would be working on at the beginning of the lesson. We...show more content...
* Kids– role–playing in playground – For this lesson we practiced with our teacher in a whole class
role–play of how to act as children. We practiced many of the features of children such as very
happy and over expressed facial features and body language often doing very childlike and
disgusting features that we thought kids would do in and act like.
* Mrs Lyons presents Mr Lyons– For this task we worked in boy/girl pairs that our teacher selected
for us. This was a good development as it enabled us to work with people we would never usually
work with and see how well we got on with each other, although for some students it was very
awkward. For this scene we performed Mrs Lyons presenting the baby that she had received from
Mrs Johnston and portraying our views of what we thought Mr Lyons reaction would be. We mainly
focused on our body language and trying to perform as naturally and real as possible.
For our main task we focused on Act 4 scenes 1 and 2 and the transition between the two. We had
to create two scenes over the period of a few lessons, which would show the first one being a
group of happy young people, enjoying themselves and having fun. We would then create a second
scene showing the change into a sad and depressed group of people in which nobody has jobs and
everybody is unhappy.
For our first
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3. Blood Brothers
Willy Russell uses the contrast of characters to show the major difference in social class in the
play Blood Brothers. Mrs Johnstone was the first character introduced to us in the play. In 'Blood
Brothers ' Mrs Johnstone lives in a poor end of Liverpool, struggling to bring up eight children on
her own and is forced to give one away to keep the others clothed and fed well enough, whereas
Mrs Lyons, whom she works for, lives in a large house, very comfortably in a nice part of
Liverpool, she wants children but is unable to have any, even though she is rich, unlike Mrs
Johnstone. Mrs Johnstone is portrayed as a stereotypical working class mother. In the introductory
song, Russell uses Mrs Johnstone to create this stereotype. "We got...show more content...
Also, due to her lack of education (presumably) Mrs Johnstone is very religious, and extremely
superstitious. This is probably due to her lack of money; therefore she must turn to superstition and
religion for support. The reader is assured of these ideas when the audience is informed that her
husband has left her, this is also a reason for her to turn to religion. It all comes down to her social
class in the hierarchy of society. This is made clear in the song "Marilyn Monroe". She sings of
how she met a man that told her she looks like Marilyn Monroe, and then gets her pregnant. They
have several more children, and then marry. He leaves her after saying that she looks "a bit like
Marilyn Monroe". This wraps the idea of social class into a neat bow, for the stereotype of working
class men is for them to aspire to marry a nice looking woman, long legs etc. Therefore Mrs
Johnstone fell into a false sense of love due to her class status, and ended up alone and vulnerable.
Her children seem to be re–living history when Linda and Mickey break up after Eddie's return from
university.
Overall, I believe that social class is the main theme in the play, and that Willy Russell has presented
the theme very effectively. The two different families living in such a close distance from each other
allows the audience to see
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