Author: Michael Hootman

Having seen it a number of times, I’m always impressed how Willy Russell’s musical is always a brilliantly captivating experience despite its potential drawbacks. Its songs aren’t exactly great – though Marilyn Monroe and Tell Me It’s Not True always hit the mark; its plot is slightly contrived and very manipulative; it seems to have remained unchanged in its staging for decades (an evil part of me wants them to bring in a radical director who will give it an all female cast and set it during the last years of the Weimar Republic). But despite all this its finale brings a tear to the eye every damn time.

Set in Liverpool in the ’70s, the it tells the story of Mrs Johnstone (Lyn Paul) a poor Catholic woman who has seven kids and another on the way. Except this new one, according to her gynaecologist, is actually twins.

She had budgeted to just about scrape by when the new baby arrives, but her scrimping won’t extend to feeding two mouths. She has a job cleaning house of local posho Mrs Lyons (Sarah Jane Buckley) who can’t have kids herself and can’t adopt as her husband is dead set against raising a child who doesn’t share his DNA. So Mrs Johnstone has one too many kids, Mrs Lyons one too few and, fortuitously, her husband is out of the country for nine months…

Lyons persuades Mrs Johnstone to hand over one of her children. The action then moves on seven years and Mickey (Josh Capper), the son who stayed with his natural mother, becomes best friends with neighbourhood toff Eddie (Mark Hutchinson).

They innocently play together, pronouncing themselves blood brothers, little realising how apt that term is. But as they grown older their lives diverge on different tracks determined by class until they both fall in love with the same childhood sweetheart Linda (Alison Crawford).

Paul gives a truly committed performance carefully balancing her character’s toughness and vulnerability. When she tells Mrs Lyons to choose one of her children but ‘just don’t tell me which one’, the despair in her voice is heartbreaking. Capper fully realises the descent of a likeable young man brought down due to prison, pills, unemployment and the seemingly malign hand of fate. Dean Chisnall’s narrator – perhaps the visible manifestation of this fate – has the requisite amount of steely non-attachment; when he occasionally hints at some sympathy it therefore becomes more affecting.

Blood Brothers is more than a conventional weepie though. Underlying it all is an anger at the the iniquities of the class system. Its political analysis is not exactly subtle – nothing about the show is subtle – but if you understand that subtlety is not necessarily a virtue you’ll be won over by this big-hearted, tough-minded, hugely entertaining evening.

Continues at the Theatre Royal, Brighton until December 3.

For more information and tickets click here.

Queen Elizabeth is dead and immediately the rest of the Royal Family are arguing about the workings of the constitution: does Charles (Robert Powell) ascend the throne immediately, or does he only become king upon his coronation? This minor problem of regal procedure soon becomes irrelevant when the King decides to upturn a centuries-old tradition by refusing to sign a bill he doesn’t agree with. And soon there’s a tank parked outside Buckingham Palace and there are vague threats of civil war.

Mike Bartlett’s play is vastly entertaining look at royalty, the machinations of the political establishment and the identity of England itself. It’s also written in blank verse and the dialogue, and some of the plotting, is self-consciously Shakespearean. It even boasts a ghostly visitation bearing a prophecy. It takes a while to adjust to modern characters brandishing the occasion ‘doth’ but, strangely, this conceit works perfectly. It strikes me almost as if Bartlett has, in part, produced a conceptual work of art, rather like a Koons sculpture which is the perfect simulacrum of a blow-up plastic toy but is actually made of cast metal.

Rather than go for mere imitation, Powell gives a brilliant portrait of a man who decides to act on principle. Whereas the real Charles is, in the popular imagination at least, something of a well meaning meddler, Powell invests him with something approaching grandeur. It’s also an entirely sympathetic portrayal which may wrong foot any republicans expecting something more obviously critical or even mocking. When his Prime Minister (Tim Treloar) tries to bring the memory of the King’s former wife to bear for his own political ends, there’s a real moment of pain as he chastises the man for trying to ‘utilise Diana’ so early on in their relationship.

Penelope Beaumont’s Camilla is as strong and determined as Kate Middleton (Jennifer Bryden), and Ben Righton is suitably determined as William, the prince who will end up betraying his father. As is fitting for the soap opera the Royal Family is, Harry (Richard Glaves) gets his own storyline in which he falls in love with a commoner (Lucy Phelps) and decides to give up any claim to the throne – and the cash from the civil list – to be with her.

The production itself is flawless. The stark but beautiful set conveys something of the coldness and tradition of the family under scrutiny; and the music by Jocelyn Pook has a solemnity which amplifies the sense of history being made.

Continues at the Theatre Royal, Brighton until Saturday 13.

For more information click here.