Blood Brothers

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Sakaynah Hunter

In this coursework I will be looking at the play Blood Brothers and exploring the themes that exist within the play, such as, social class, inequality, gun crime and the most crucial theme yet, superstition. Blood Brothers came to screens in 1983, it was written by a man name Willy Russell whom spent the whole of 1982 turning the small scale production of Blood Brothers into a full scale musical. Blood Brothers is a very theatrical production and so, to help me with my coursework, my drama class and I was able to go and see the play live in the Phoenix Theatre on the 30th October 2007. This was a wonderful experience as I was shown the differences between the perception of rich and poor and the main themes of the play became much clearer. For instance, I discovered that the most vital theme of this play was superstition and the use of props and setting such as the poor houses being situated on the left hand side of the stage and the rich houses amongst the right uprooted the fact that status was also explored widely.

The story of Blood Brothers is about a poor woman who gives birth to twins and to help her financially gives one of them to a wealthy and manipulative woman; Mrs Lyons gives Ms Johnston money as redundancy pay and then manipulates the situation; she threatens her of the twins dying if they ever find out about their relations with one another. Through this, Ms Lyons plays on Mrs Johnston superstitious nature.

The use of props and setting bettered my understanding of the play and revealed the messages the writer was trying to convey. Because the stage was split into two different areas, the rich side and the poor side, this helped me to distinguish the differences in class. For example, Ms Johnston’s house was one out of several flats that had broken windows and chipped paint across front doors; this became symbolic of the fact she was underprivileged. On the other hand, against the right hand side of the stage was Ms Lyons house which was well furbished with neat wooden furniture and thick patterned carpet. This showed she however, was well-off. Other than the set showed on the stage, the props became useful sources to the goings-on in the play. To clarify, the new shoes were figurative of superstition because twice in the play it had been used to link in with superstition. For instance near the start of the play when Ms Lyons places her new shoes on the table, Ms Johnston showed her paranoia by insisting that the shoes are displaced from the table. Plus later on when the husband of Mrs Lyons (Mr Lyons) places his shoe on the table, Mrs Lyons become panicky herself as she loudly screams “no…” to make sure the shoes were withdrawn from the table. This helped to create tension as we could see Ms Lyons becoming more and more affected by her own actions and the narrator also served a purpose, to not let her forget.

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The use of costume in the play also showed the differences between the rich and poor. To explain Mrs Lyons was always dressed in beautiful frocks and she changed her elegant attire many times during the play. Ms Johnston on the other hand, was always wearing basic clothing with an apron, plus her outfit didn’t change once throughout the play. Not only did Mrs Lyons and Ms Johnston’s costume show the divisions between rich and poor but Eddie and Mickey’s costume did too. Mickey was dressed in old scruffy clothing, his brown shorts looked as if they were not ...

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