Blood Brothers Portfolio Section A

“Devastating … a masterpiece. If you haven’t seen it, go. If you have, go again” News of the World

Blood Brothers is probably best performed in a naturalistic way as to get the meaning of the story across and for it to make a big impact on an audience. For most of the scenes in our group we are going to do them in a naturalistic way to try and make a more emotional impact. Although one scene is a montage and there isn’t much dialogue so we have decided to do this scene in a berkoffian style.

In rehearsals we have used a few different conventions to get into character. Firstly to get into the mind state of a seven-year-old we improvised scenes of what a seven-year-old might do in a day. We improvised Mickey and Linda stealing sweets from the corner shop with Edward, showing him what to do. We also did hot seating for 4 of the characters. Mickey, Eddie, Mrs Johnstone and Mrs Lyons. We did this to find out more about their backgrounds and to find out what life was like for each character before they met each other.

In the performance we are looking at putting in monologues for Mrs Johnstone and Mrs Lyons. This will be at the end to get their reactions to what has happened. We are going to improvise around this in rehearsals to see different reactions and which would fit best to each character. We have changed the order of the scenes we are going to do from the order they are in in the play so it will be like a flashback. We are going to start with the death scene, then go back to the beginning and follow with the events leading up to and after the deaths of Eddie and Mickey.  We may also use split focus to highlight the similarities and differences between both families.