Choose a play which you have seen and that you particularly enjoyed. Discuss the aspects which made it so successful = Willy Russell's 'Blood Brothers'

        An actor I particularly liked and enjoyed the performance of was the actor playing the character of ‘Micky’. I liked his use of voice, physicality and the overall creation of character. For example he had to convince the audience that in the beginning he was a child when in actual fact the actor is an adult. However I believe that the actor was extremely successful in doing this as we, the audience forgot he was an adult and wholly believed that he was a child. In the early parts of the play in which Micky was a child he used his voice to create a convincing portrayal of childhood, his voice was high pitched and fast paced whereas towards the end of the play when he went mad and was addicted to his prescription drugs his voice was deeper and slower. At this point Micky also spoke quieter, stumbling and stuttering over his words. This created the effect that he had in effect lost the life and liveliness that he had early on in the play and evoked empathy for him and his whole situation from us the audience. The actor playing Micky used a strong liverpudlian accent throughout the play using a lot of slang and colloquialisms. This established him as one of the poorer, more ‘common’ characters in the play and created a stronger contrast with the more well-of character of Eddie who spoke with a very ‘proper’ English accent.

        During the scenes in which he was a child, the actor playing Micky used his physicality by keeping low levels most of the time to create the impression of the smallness in size of a young child. He also moved around quickly and rarely kept still thus capturing the energy and excitable nature of most young children. Mickey mostly ran, jumped or skipped around the stage rarely walking. An interesting physical device used by this actor was to mime riding a horse as often children do.

        I do not know for sure but I would suspect that the actor playing Micky used some of Stanislavski’s rehearsal techniques in order to get into the character and mind of a child and to help him play this role so successfully. For example he could have used ‘imagination’ to imagine what a child would do and how they would feel in the ‘given circumstances’. He may also have used ‘observation’ and by observing children’s behaviour created a memory bank of gestures, actions and physicality to use. Another technique that this actor likely used is ‘emotion memory’ and by remembering how he felt and behaved as a child he could create the character of Micky convincingly.

        A moment I particularly liked in this play was the end scene where the Brothers have both died and the final song is sung. I think that the use of proxemics in this scene was extremely effective. For instance the two brother’s ‘bodies’ were lying side by side  centre stage with Linda crouching at their side and Mrs Johnston standing behind them. As Mrs Johnston began singing   the other characters appeared on stage around the edges and gradually joined in with the song. Mrs Lyons, Eddie’s adopted mother was positioned at the very back underneath the arch. This created a distance with her from the action in strong contrast with Mrs Johnston who was right at the side of both her sons representing her closeness and her bond with them as their birth mother. At this moment Mrs Johnston lifted the hands of both brother’s and placed them together. This was a key symbolic gesture as it represented the invisible bond between the brothers and even though they were now deed it suggests they are still connected and together in death.

        At the end of the play the audience experienced a strong feeling of catharsis with many audience members moved to tears. This was down to the convincing portrayal of the characters by the actors throughout the play so that by the time it came to the death of the brothers, the audience felt that they knew the characters and could empathise with them therefore their death was like a loss for the audience and even though we learn at the beginning that the brothers die we still hoped that they didn’t.