Blood Brothers Flashcards
Tell me about the character mrs Johnston
At the beginning of the play Mrs Johnstone is a single mother of seven children who is described in the stage directions as ‘aged thirty but looks more like fifty’, although in her opening song Mrs Johnstone describes herself as ‘twenty-five’ but looking ‘forty-two’; either way she is young but her life has aged her prematurely. At the beginning of the play the Narrator says that the story is of ‘a mother, so cruel, | There’s a stone in the play of her heart’ and invites the audience to judge her for themselves. Mrs Johnstone is depicted as a tragic figure through her comparison to Marilyn Monroe; her tragic flaw is perhaps her gullibility but she could also be seen as the victim of her circumstances, a single mother with little money who tried to give one of her children the chance of a better life.
Tell me about the character, Mrs. Lyon’s.
Mrs Jennifer Lyons is the middle-class contrast to Mrs Johnstone: she has a big house, plenty of money, a husband but no children. Mrs Lyons’ vulnerability is revealed through her verse in the song ‘My Child’ in which she confesses her dreams of having her own child. She is presented as quite manipulative, asking her husband for a substantial sum of money which she says is for things for the baby and nursery, and then using the money to pay Mrs Johnstone to leave. She then threatens Mrs Johnstone with prison and when that does not seem to work, makes up the superstition that twins ‘secretly parted’ will ‘immediately die’ if they ever learn that they are a twin. She is portrayed several times as violent. When Mrs Johnstone says she will take Edward, Mrs Lyons ‘roughly drags her out of the way’. She hits Edward ‘hard and instinctively’ when he swears and tries to attack Mrs Johnstone with a kitchen knife when she refuses to leave Skelmersdale. Mrs Lyons’ mental state is shown to gradually disintegrate during the play. One key way this is conveyed is through the way she reacts to superstitions. At the beginning of the play she laughs at them but then as she becomes more desperate about losing Edward, she starts to believe them. She is referred to as a ‘mad woman’ by kids’ voices (offstage) in a chant just after she threatens Mrs Johnstone.
Tell me about the character mr Lyon’s
Mr Lyons is distant from the most of the domestic scenes in the play. He always seems to be rushing off to work, the stage direction when we first meet him just after the twins have been born has him ‘glancing at his watch’ and then saying ‘I’ve got a board meeting. I really must dash’. He is traditional about the division of their responsibilities, feeling that the decisions about their home are his wife’s ‘domain’. Unlike Mrs Johnstone, Mr Lyons is treated with respect by the policeman, who calls him ‘sir’ and the two men are able to resolve Edward’s ‘prank’ over a drink. Mr Lyons’ final scene is as a managing director who is making lots of workers, including Mickey, redundant. He sings ‘Take A Letter Miss Jones’, which takes quite a cavalier approach to laying people off, blaming ‘the times’, ‘the world situation’ and ‘the recession’. Throughout the play Mr and Mrs Lyons represent a comfortable middle class, who are never troubled by money troubles or financial insecurity. Edward inherits this secure existence, enabled by his private school and university education.
Tell me about the character mickey
Mickey (Michael) Johnstone is the twin that stays with his mother Mrs Johnstone. He is the youngest of the Johnstones and seems to suffer at the hands of his older brother Sammy. At seven Mickey is streetwise, shown through his knowledge of swear words and the fact that he has a penknife, but when playing with the other kids Mickey gets singled out and has to rely on his friend Linda for protection and comfort. Mickey at fourteen is presented as a typical teenager, self-conscious about his appearance and starting to be interested in girls. The scenes on the bus and in the classroom show that Linda is still supporting and defending him. When he leaves school his narrow range of job opportunities is represented by him having a boring factory job making cardboard boxes, which disappears when the economy turns bad. The effect that losing his job has on Mickey is presented by his aggression towards his blood brother when Edward returns from university. This turns to depression after his involvement in the robbery, when Sammy shoots the garage worker, as he is described in the stage directions as having ‘tears streaming down his face’ and is ‘silently crying’ when he is arrested and continues crying when he is in prison. While in prison he is compared to Marilyn Monroe because she struggled with depression and was prescribed medication. Mrs Johnstone’s song continues to narrate his release from prison but describes him as looking ‘fifteen years older’ and having slow speech, presumably the effects of the medication he is taking. Mickey could be seen as the tragic hero of the play, his disappointment with his life leading to his plan to shoot Edward for taking Linda. The real tragedy happens, however, when Mrs Johnstone arrives, Mickey has just said that that he couldn’t shoot Edward and that he wasn’t even sure if the gun was loaded when his Mum tells them that they are twins. Mickey’s fury at this, his rage that if he had been given away instead of Edward then he would have had a better life, causes his gun to go off, killing Edward.
Tell me about the character Edward
Edward is the twin who is taken by Mrs Lyons to bring up as her own. Mrs Johnstone, Mickey and Linda all immediately shorten his name to Eddie, which shows us the more informal life he would have had if he had stayed with Mrs Johnstone. Edward’s social status or class is represented by the way he speaks, especially when compared to Mickey. His accent and his higher level of vocabulary represent his middle-class upbringing. When the twins meet aged fourteen Edward says ‘shag the vicar’ and Mickey laughs at his ‘posh voice’. Edward is presented as more confident about expressing himself than Mickey as, due to his superior education, he has a wider, more mature and more expressive vocabulary; he is able to create a parody of romantic clichés about how to speak to girls because he’s ‘read about it’, saying ‘my loins are burning for you’ and describing Linda’s imagined reply as a ‘husky … be gentle with me, be gentle’. Edward appears more confident overall, he is the one who suggests they go and watch ‘Nymphomaniac Nights and Swedish Au Pairs’ and who dances around shouting ‘tits, tits, tits’ in the street afterwards, and who jumps around the lamp post and says ‘Adolf Hitler’ to the policeman. He also orchestrates Mickey and Linda finally getting together just before he goes off to university, despite the fact that he loves Linda too and is able to articulate his feelings much more eloquently than Mickey when he sings ‘I’m Not Saying A Word’. Although Blood Brothers purports to be ‘the story of the Johnstone twins’ more of Mickey’s story is told than Edward’s. Edward’s more privileged upbringing is there to serve as a contrast to Mickey’s working-class life and to demonstrate the sort of life Mickey could have had if he had the same opportunities. Still, Edward’s life is not presented as perfect: his dad is absent a lot as he is at work; he is teased by other students at school and bullied by his teacher; his relationship with Mrs Lyons is sometimes difficult; and he loses the girl he loves to Mickey.
Tell me about the character Linda
Linda is the same age as Mickey and Edward and lives close to Mickey. She comes across as feisty and confident, unafraid to stand against the larger groups of older kids in defence of Mickey. Linda receives the ultimate compliment a seven-year old-boy can give from Mickey when he introduces her to Edward saying ‘she’s a girl but she’s all right’, and she turns out to be a crack shot with Sammy’s air gun, hitting the Peter Pan statue every time. During the ‘Summer Sequence’ there is a premonition of what is to come when the scene freezes as she is between the two twins playing piggy-in-the-middle as the narrator says ‘who’d tell the girl in the middle of the pair | The price she’ll pay for just being there’. Here Linda is presented as an innocent victim caught up in the tragic story of the twins. After Mickey comes out of prison Linda’s physical appearance and demeanour has changed. The stage directions describe how she ‘is weighed down with shopping bags and is weary’ and her renewed contact with Edward is described by the Narrator, at the beginning of ‘Light Romance’, as her trying to rediscover the ‘girl inside the woman’. At the end of the play Mrs Johnstone retakes the central position between the two boys that had been occupied by Linda
Tell me about the character sammy
Sammy is Mickey and Edward’s older brother, Mrs Johnstone’s seventh child. When he is ten Sammy cuts a very impressive figure, according to his younger brother. Mickey admires him for having ‘two worms and a catapult | An’ he’s built an underground den’. Other attributes include spitting, playing with matches, going to bed late, drawing ‘nudey women’ and weeing through next door’s letter box. There is already, however, a slightly darker side to Sammy, even at ten – he takes Mickey’s toys, including his gun and his car, which he breaks, and Mickey says that ‘y’ have to be dead careful if our Sammy gives y’a sweet’ because ‘if our Sammy gives y’ a sweet he’s usually weed on it first’. Mickey also tells Edward that when Sammy was little and had been left in the care of his big sister Donna Marie, he ‘fell out the window an’ broke his head’ which meant that he had to have a plate put in it (this would be a metal plate put in to replace a broken or missing piece of skull). Sammy takes a lead role in ‘Kids’ Game’ in the opposite gang to Mickey and Linda and tends to come out on top, producing a ‘bazooka’ when faced with a gun and making a bomb as Professor Howe. Linda is the only one who gets the better of him when she threatens to tell her mother ‘why all her ciggies always disappear when you’re in our house’. Unfortunately the move to the country doesn’t seem to improve Sammy. We learn from Mrs Johnstone’s opening in Act II that ‘our Sammy burnt the school down’ and then he robs the bus conductor at knifepoint. The character Sammy is always hovering in the background of Mickey’s life as a warning of the road he shouldn’t take; both Linda and Mrs Johnstone warn Mickey not to be like Sammy. Sammy is aligned with guns from the start of the play. He steals Mickey’s toy gun and it is Sammy’s air gun that the twins and Linda use to shoot at Peter Pan and it is the gun that he hides after the garage shooting that Mickey fetches when he goes after Edward at the end of the play.
Tell me about the character the policeman
There is a policeman in a few key scenes. It does not really matter if the same actor from the chorus plays all the policemen each time or if different actors do, as it is the role which is important rather than whether or not it is the same person. The first policeman, who appears when the children are seven, is used to demonstrate how the Johnstones and the Lyons are treated differently by someone in authority. A policeman is also there to celebrate at the end of Act I when the Johnstones are moving away because he feels that will be ‘a sharp drop in the crime rate’ when they’re gone. After the cinema trip their run-in with a policeman shows that Edward, Mickey and Linda have grown up a bit as they are now able to give him the slip. There are two policemen at the very end of the play who are used to create an authentic crisis situation by entering through the auditorium. It is police guns that kill Mickey.
Tell me about the character dona Maria
Donna Marie is older sister to Sammy, Mickey and Edward. She is there really to remind the audience that there are older siblings than Sammy and Mickey living with Mrs Johnstone. The only other time Donna Marie is mentioned is to indicate how much time has passed between the acts as Mrs Johnstone says that her older children have left home and that Donna Marie already has three children of her own.
Tell me about the character Perkins
Perkins is one of the students in Mickey’s class in the school scene. He is a keen student and is eager to answer the question about the Boro Indians. The teacher’s rude and dismissive response, he says ‘shut up Perkins, y’ borin’ little turd’, illustrates the dire atmosphere in the school.
Tell me about the character mrs jones
Miss Jones is Mr Lyons’ secretary at the factory and is writing the letters that are laying the workers off. The irony of the song is that eventually she gets one of the letters herself.
Tell me about the character Sarah Johnston
Sarah is Mickey and Linda’s daughter; she never appears on stage but Linda checks that Mrs Johnstone has picked her up from school (‘did y’ get our Sarah from school’) and so illustrates that five or six years must have passed while Mickey was in prison.
Describe the Theme, class
At the end of the play, straight after the twins die, the Narrator asks two questions: “And do we blame superstition for what came to pass? Or could it be what we, the English, have come to know as class?” Willy Russell is quite clear, in the extract from his letter to Chris Bond, reprinted in the Methuen Edition of the play (pp. 95–96), that he wanted to show that ‘class splits these two brothers, that class keeps them apart, that class killed them’. Mickey’s cry, when he finds out that Edward was given away; “I could have been him” conveys his anger at the circumstances of his own life. Edward’s middle-class upbringing has given him a better education and a secure job and Mickey is angry that his working-class upbringing gave him none of the same opportunities but instead offered him insecure employment and exposure to crime and criminal behaviour. Mickey’s lack of opportunity, compared to Edward, means that he ended up spending many years in prison, has become dependent on drugs and thinks that he has lost his wife. It is the chronic unfairness of this, when both brothers started off in life exactly the same, that leads to their tragic ends when the gun in Mickey’s hand explodes. The play does not, however, present a simplistic view of class where the middle-class way of life is better than the working-class one. Edward’s private school is not perfect, he is teased and suspended for having a locket and Mr Lyons sometimes seems more interested in work than his family. Despite being deprived of financial security and educational and work opportunities, Mickey does have the love and support of his mother and Linda and, while ‘Kids’ Game’ does show that the working-class kids are a bit rough, it also looks great fun. Mrs Johnstone may be old before her time but she is shown to be happy with her life in Skelmersdale when she rejects Mrs Lyons’ offer of more money to move. By portraying both positive and negative sides to middle-class and working-class life neither is shown to be better than the other, instead it is the inequality of opportunity that is to blame.
Describe the theme superstition
Belief in superstition is seen, at the beginning of the play at least, as an indication of being working class. Mrs Lyons laughs at Mrs Johnstone for being superstitious and then tells Edward that the ‘bogey man’ is something a ‘silly mother’ might tell her children about, but her fragile emotional state is demonstrated when Edward is missing by her suddenly pushing the shoes that Mr Lyons has put on the table to the floor. Edward mentions the superstition about magpies just after they move to the country to show that, despite Mrs Lyons’ hopes, he hasn’t lost his connections to the Johnstones and their beliefs just because they’ve moved away. The Narrator refers to other superstitions in the song ‘Shoes Upon The Table’ straight after Mrs Lyons makes up the superstition about twins separated at birth, and superstitions are repeated at key points during the play to build tension. The link between the Narrator and superstition makes him a kind of bogey man in the play and so superstition serves as a useful means of creating a sense of threat and tension, and in the end Mrs Lyons’ made-up superstition about separated twins dying comes true.
Define the theme nature vs nurture
The use of twins being separated makes the nature vs nurture question more prominent than if it had been just siblings or friends who were being brought up in different types of homes. Nurture is made the focus because the two boys had an identical starting point (nature). Edward’s confidence, eloquence, education and success are clearly portrayed as being down to class rather than any innate qualities. In the same way Mickey’s unemployment, involvement in crime, depression and then violence are laid at the door of his class (nurture) rather than a character flaw (nature)
