From the beginning of the play we are alerted to the Johnston’s family severe financial situation when we are shown that they cannot even afford to pay the milkman in Act 1, scene 2, ‘Look, honest, I will pay you next week’. A modern audience would perceive this as very strange, although we have to take into account that the play is set during the recession. So a contemporary may view it as being something that they themselves may have even gone through. We are given another alarming insight from the Mother in Act 1 scene 5, ‘the welfare’s already been on to me, they say I should put some of them into care’. This is revealed to us after we here the Mother is due too have twins, and that there is no way she can cope with them both. These events immediately make the audience feel compassion for the Mother, her husband has just left her, and ‘the welfare’ are threatening to take away her children even though, ‘they mean the world’ to her.
We don’t meet the character Linda until Act 2, scene 4, even though she develops through the play to be a very important role, especially within her relationships with the twins, Mickey, and Eddie. She is almost used a dramatic device herself within the play, and even takes the role of the narrator in Act 5, scene 1. From the moment we first meet Linda we know she is a great friend of Mickey’s but she soon develops a strong friendship Eddie as well, and as a group they have fun and joke, causing ‘the three of them to break up with giggles’. From this moment on Linda proves to be a strong link between Eddie and Mickey. We are shown in Act 3 scene 2 that Mickey wants to ask her to be his girlfriend, although he cannot ‘pluck up’ the courage. Mickey tries to help him with this when he says, ‘I’ll tell you what to say’, and he then goes on to explain a some what unorthodox method as if straight from a movie. In Act 4 Scene 1 we hare told that ‘Eddie dances with Linda, ostentatiously waltzing her. Mickey exits.’ This is where we first start to see that Mickey may be thinking of Linda as more than a friend, and it also rekindles the thought of Eddie saying ‘I would have asked you out ages ago’.
At the beginning of the play, we are given a short introduction by the narrator, which gives us an insight of future events over the course of the play. One of the main events in the play that is given away is the fact the twins are separated, one of which being given away. We have to be very careful of this though, as having read the play I believe that the introduction is more of a false opinion, which I, myself do not agree with. We are told that the Mother has ‘a stone in place of a heart’. This is why it is important that we are not a passive audience, as we cannot always believe what seems to be the simplest answer, and that we do have to make our own decisions.
Throughout the course of the play superstition plays a very big part in the forthcoming events. We first encounter this in Act 1, scene 3 Mrs Lyons places new shoes on the table, and the Mother becomes very nervous and shouts out, ‘Oh God. Never put new shoes on a table’. We are then reminded of this encounter at the end of the scene when the narrator quotes yet more superstitious acts. This is one of the reasons that Mrs Lyons uses the Bible, when she makes the Mother swear that she ‘will never speak of this to anyone, as if the twins find out they will die’. As Mrs Johnston is a very superstitious person, swearing on the Bible would mean a lot to her, and she therefore believes the tales that Mrs Lyons Spins. Such events like this pop up throughout the play, and they also play heavily in the final act, where we are shown yet more symbols of bad luck by the narrator, such as the quote, ‘Only black cards dealt on the thirteenth day’.