The two plays have similar and different styles of language. Blood Brothers uses a mixture of different styles whereas Bouncers has a northern, gritty accent and uses modern slang such as “I wanted to have ‘em” and “Gerrin’ past it”. Blood Brothers has varied styles of language. The working class actors use a the typical Liverpudlian accent “’Ey mother I’m starvin’” whereas the higher class actors such as Edward and his family use a more refined accent “Oh Mummy… stop fussing … I’m going to be late” with the focus on correct pronunciation. The styles of language used all depends on the culture of that particular actor and what role and class in the play they have. Similarly to the language, Blood Brothers has varied cultures throughout the production from the working class up to the higher class. However there is only one culture in Bouncers, the working class gritty men with an individual yet funny view of contemporary life in the 1990’s. Blood Brothers also uses a narrator who used a heightened verse, similar to some of Shakespeare’s work. The narrator both spoke and sung, he had a symbolic function and was poetic. Both omnipresent and omniscient he was able to tell the story with a dramatic quality. “There’s a full moon shining and a joker in the pack, The dealers dealt the cards, and he won’t take them back, There’s a black cat stalking and a woman who’s afraid, That there’s no getting off without the price being paid.”
Both plays have multi-roles; meaning one actor may have more than one part to play in the production. Bouncers have the stereotypical ‘lads’ or ‘punters’. The type of men who on a Friday night go out drinking looking for a good time. The bouncers can suddenly transform into these ‘blokes’ as they share similar cultures and language. Blood Brothers uses the multi-roles as a comedy, trying to be deliberately cartoon like by having the milkman turn into the husband, gynaecologist, judge and a few other roles who were their two dimensional characters.
In both plays there is limited space on the stage. In Blood Brothers, Marty Flood uses the restricted space to his advantage making it symbolic, using it to make it look a lot bigger than it really is. Blood Brothers uses a mixture of realistic sets and scenery which also helps to create a feeling of space. The sides of the stage are rows of council estates and although they are not very big in reality, to the eye they look bigger because of the backdrop used. The backdrops used were successful as they showed what was in the background of the setting, for example the city of Liverpool and also the great stretching countryside. By cleverly using scenery you were led to believe that you were somewhere beyond the reach of the setting, almost an illusion. Marty Flood was successful in this when he used flashing lights and fairground music to create the illusion that Mickey, Eddie and Lynda were at a fair ground. Once this was accompanied by mime this turned out to be extremely successful. He used this anti-illusionist technique throughout and it all added to the comical side of the play. The staging changes a lot throughout the play however it is only small things that do change. Changing a backdrop, and using cycloramas for instance made the audience feel they were now in a different house or street without changing the main setting. Bouncers however did not change the set. Although there were slight scene changes we were able to keep the set constant. Although there was a slight lack of space in Bouncers it did not matter, as there was no scene which could not have used the exact same set from the scene before. By using scenery again it makes the audience believe they were somewhere else even though the main set had not been changed. Both plays were set in the proscenium arch as they both had scenery in the background and backdrops. Neither of the plays could have been done in the round.
The costumes in both plays related to the culture and time they were set in. Blood Brothers for instance uses 1960’s styles, children excluding Eddie wore tatty ‘hand me downs’ with rips in their clothing, men wore jackets and suits for work and women wore cleaning clothes often with an apron. As the children grew up their costumes changed in accordance to their ages. Mickey for instance wore tatty ripped stained clothes when young but when he was a teenager began to wear jeans and leather jackets in an attempt to impress Lynda. Finally once he had aged terribly he wore baggy clothes to keep him warm and dressed in clothes meant for a person much older than him. This happened with Eddie and Lynda too. As Eddie grew up he went from wearing posh school boy shirts and ties to wearing suits as he had a job, and Lynda went from wearing long skirts and blouses to wearing shorter skirts and looking generally more ‘tarty’.
The characters in Blood Brothers progress through their life as the play goes on. In the few hours it takes for the play to finish the main characters have grown from dependant children to fully-grown independent adults. This then has a dramatic effect on the audience. By seeing the actors come from children to adults makes the audience feel they have know them for a much longer time, therefore in the more dramatic and powerful scenes such as the final scenes when Mickey shoots Eddie, the audience feel empathy and sadness. In Bouncers however the time progression is a lot slower, as the play is set in one single night, it is “actors theatre” using set pieces and short extracts to create entertainment rather than drama.
In ‘Bouncers’ there were a few monologues from each character. These monologues were used to either express the characters emotions at the time or used to describe something. The monologues written for the character ‘Lucky Eric’ were able to bring a more dramatic side to the play as they were much more heartfelt and emotional than the dialogue between the bouncers. There were no monologues in Blood Brothers however as Blood Brothers was a musical many of the emotions of the characters were brought out in the songs. Mrs Johnston for instance kept repeating the ‘Marilyn Monroe’ theme to express how her dreams were shattered and kept dreaming of what living a life like ‘Marilyn Monroe’ would be like. In many of the songs written for Mrs Johnston she appears to be drowning her sorrows for example after Mickey and Eddie have died she repeats the line “Tell me its no true, tell me it’s a story”.
To conclude the two plays ‘Bouncers’ and ‘Blood Brothers’ are very different in a number of different ways. The two plays are based around two completely different ideas and are two different types of theatre, one being a musical the other being a normal production. The only similarities these two plays share are a similar time setting and the country it was set in and a joint theme of broken dreams
