There are many ways of seeing this apparent social divide, and all of them have plenty of evidence from within the text to support them. For example Mrs. Lyons’ ‘disadvantages’ like constant loneliness and isolation from close family; her husband who always has to dash away within moments of being there, which makes us question; is she really happy? Mrs. Johnstone picks up on this and innocently says when she hears that Mrs. Lyons husband will be along in a few months, “The house won’t feel so empty then, will it?” And later even Mrs. Lyons admits that the house is quite large, putting two and two together helps you realise that an empty house with not many people living in it relates to loneliness.
She does have a lot of money which Mrs. Johnstone doesn’t, but Mrs. Johnstone has loads of children around her however I can quote her saying, “Me husband used to say that all we had to do was shake hands and I’d be in the club.” We can interpret this two ways, either she really is frustrated that she can’t stop having children constantly, or this is her little advantage over Mrs. Lyons and her tone will be light-hearted and she actually enjoys this. I think that would be down to how the dialogue in that part is spoken, or down to the director and what emotions they want to portray. Maybe the fact Mrs. Johnstone has money is the reason she got the baby in the first place; she emotionally blackmails Mrs. Johnstone by saying, “if he grew up here as our son, he could have everything.” Mrs. Johnstone obviously wants the best for her child and Mrs. Lyons is using the fact she is wealthy to persuade her to hand over the child. Mrs.
Something else I only lightly covered was money issues; Mrs. Johnstone always has debt collectors at her door, even in one scene we have her mistake her son knocking at the door for one with her screaming, “go away!” to the person. Meanwhile we see on page 18 how Mrs. Lyons without hesitation asks for fifty pounds (which considering that era was a lot of money) and we see Mr. Lyons only question her once as to why. The stage direction then reads ‘he hands her the money’ whether or not he hesitates further in doing so is again up to the director. But the nature of how he simply gives the money and then exits shows how much well off she in compared to Mrs. Johnstone. Russell helps us sympathise with Mrs. Johnstone by showing us what she has to go through, what seems like everyday with the debt collectors. Constantly nagging her for money she obviously doesn’t have, and he shows the debt collectors dialogue more as a threat then anything else. The milkman for example threatens her by saying, “I’ll be forced to cut off your deliveries.” ‘Forced’ a very strong word, as they seem to like Mrs. Johnstone but have no choice, showing that they must be as sick of it as Mrs. Johnstone herself. Milk is something we take for granted now, and to say she doesn’t have enough money to even pay off milk deliveries shows how bad things are.
The social divide is obviously there and signs can be even heard in the dialogue too, in the same scene as noted above when Mrs. Johnstone mistakes her son for a salesman. Mickey at this point knows he’s speaking to his mum yet still continues to ‘swear’ or at least use foul language to her by saying, “open the bleedin’ door.” And throughout the play To refer to their mothers, Mickey uses “Mam” and Eddie uses “Mummy” for their titles, Classing “bleedin’” as a swear word may not be completely right as further on in the play we see all of the children making a fuss about somebody saying the “F” word. Evidently Mrs. Johnstone’s superstition had rubbed off onto the children as they chant a rhyme about how they will be punished in hell for saying it. However as the boys grow closer they share jokes and their different upbringing become apparent again in their language and use of it. The boys find a swear word very funny and when Eddie says he will look the “F” word up in the dictionary, Mickey is clueless to what the object is. Maybe that though was a technique used by Russell, as I found that part to be quite funny and light-hearted, in this innocent comedy he could be making us sympathise with the character in that Mickey may not know any better.
The differences between the boys creates humour as one is very bright and willing to share his sweets whereas the other is all too eager to accept the sweets as he rarely gets offered them (essentially then, these two are complete opposites). Even the way Mickey says, “give us a sweet” may be seen as rude, for the fact he didn’t say please, the slang and the fact they’ve only just met. Then the opinions of the two show, of how they feel about each other, Mickey not knowing much in the way of values calls Eddie “soft”, which I’ve done some research into to conclude that he’s either calling him homosexual (something looked down upon in 1970’s Liverpool) or saying that he’s posh and doesn’t know how to look after himself. And coming back to humour, I found the play at some parts to be quite hilarious, for example when Mickey constantly reiterates that he’s not 7 but “almost 8”, I remember (when watching the performance and reading the script) the majority of people roaring with laughter, and the more it was repeated the funnier it seemed to get! It’s these comic moments like such as that that make it an “entertaining drama” as the original statement suggested.
To note yet another recurring theme that makes this all the more entertaining there’s superstition, and anybody who’s read the book realises how superstitious Mrs. Johnstone is and her belief in these ‘old wives tales’ as we’d called them today. For example early in act I when Mrs. Lyons laughs almost in pity at Mrs. Johnstone’s ‘overreaction’ to her putting new shoes on the table. In truth it’s such an obvious theme that there is even a musical number for it, namely ‘shoes upon the table’, when I went to watch the play I believe the director purposefully chose a narrator with a booming voice to emphasise the fact that the factors of “bad luck” may actually come back even when the play seems in quite a lively mood and everyone seems happy with the outcome. There is a close link between superstition and class in the play. Mrs. Johnstone is alarmed by superstitious beliefs and this seems to have been passed on to the lower class children when they’re all playing their game of ‘cowboys and Indians’. This is used by Mrs. Lyons to manipulate Mrs. Johnstone; some would say that she in fact blackmailed her emotionally by saying how the other twin would have a better life with them. Then making her promise that she would give the twin over when it was born (at the point when Mrs. Johnstone was most venerable), Mrs. Lyons took advantage of the fact that Mrs. Johnstone is a devout Christian and would find it very hard to go back on her word. These twist-in-tail points can be seen as ‘dramatic irony’, we as an audience can sense that something bad may or is about to happen from the little hints given like some that were mentioned above (the things that people do which are thought to be bad luck) in fact the splitting up of the twins had its own superstitious predictions behind it. But is superstition the main theme? The Narrator at the very end of the play (after the passing of the Johnstone twins) questions in his final piece whether class was more to blame and places in society.
I believe even the characters themselves know that a higher class person (Eddie) lives a better life than working class, to quote Mickey on a few occasions we hear him saying “I wish I was a little bit like that guy” and “I wish I could be like... my friend”, in each of these he is talking about Eddie and wanting to be him, or be like him. The social class struggle and differences turn into a power struggle, especially at the end of the play when they both seem to have fallen out with each other.
At the end of the play when Mickey goes round to Eddie’s house with a
gun because he's tired of all the ‘control’ Eddie has over everything he
just breaks down and tells him everything. The symbol of the gun had appeared many time previously in the play, but at them times it was just a ‘toy’ and was practically harmless, bringing back the idea of dramatic irony, maybe this was another hint of bad things to come. Being held at
gun point would have been scary for Eddie and you can tell by the
things he say that he is very panicky and stutters a lot when he admits to taking Linda out. This would have been heartbreaking for Mickey because Eddie had control over a lot of things in Mickey's life he believed that Linda was the only thing he possessed to his advantage over Eddie, but now he had found out that he even had control over his wife, who was the thing he cherished the most. Mickey says "I've got the power now” when he is talking about his possession of a gun. He does this because he wants to be in control over Eddie for once. In terms of the ending, well there are two separate endings but which both end with the Johnstone twins both dying simultaneously.
To conclude and to come back to the originally posed statement “Willy Russell writes entertaining drama and champions the socially disadvantaged”. I did some research into what boxes a drama would have to tick, so to speak, in order to pass as ‘entertaining’. Mainly it seems to be down to a matter of opinion and dependant on the genre of the play and the type that the audience like. ‘Entertaining’ is subjective and interpretive as what appeals to one person, might not appeal to other people, yet might be a valid piece of entertainment. It is said that everybody seems to be a critic; a drama that somebody may seem to like may include parts within it that they didn’t like. Overall though, and to quote a few film critics on what makes an entertaining drama they used words such as, “suspenseful”, “Angst” and “unpredictable”. To highlight just 2 out of three of them, in terms of suspense, I did mention previously about how little signs; for example lyrics in the songs hint on to something occurring. Like how superstition was mentioned a lot in the songs but no consequence had occurred for their actions (putting the shoes on the table and the obvious secret splitting of the twins).
For unpredictability there’s the fact that the part I consider to be the nadir of the play (namely, when Mickey is fired from his factory job, which forces him onto the dole and Mickey resorting to assissting his brother in armed robbery) follows straight after Eddie and Mickey realise that they are the same two boys who used to play together when they were eight, and a joyful re-union takes place. This change all seems to happen quite quickly and would come across as a shock to the audience. Now, class and social status come into play a lot and I believe I’ve infact learnt something from reading the story that; difference in class shouldn’t affect more important things like friendship, and status can alter one’s personality as well as jealousy or wanting to be like someone else. This is what I believe Russell wanted us to learn from this play
Whether Russell ‘champions the socially disadvantaged’ is another question, maybe he uses contrasting characters to portray his ideas on socially disadvantaged people during the 1980s (Mrs. Johnstone to Mrs. Lyons and Mickey to Eddie). To some people they may appear as the victims and unfortunates as they can’t really do anything to help the fact they’re poor and essentially living hand to mouth. In my opinion maybe he was sympathising with them as we know that he himself was born into a working class family, and with the fact he tried his hand at a large majority of differnet trades he would’ve made a variety of observations (hense maybe his inspiration for Blood Brothers). Overall, the themes in the play come together to make a very entertaining piece and it seems that there is diverse opinion as to whether he champions the disadvantaged; In my view though that was what Russell intended.