I now feel that I fully understand the form and structure of 'Blood Brothers'. It is a episodic comedy/tragedy that really shows you how tough it was to live as a working class in 'Thatcher's Britain'

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25th March 2006

GCSE Drama – Written Portfolio

Paper 1 – Unit 2

The text that we have been studying in Drama is Willy Russell’s ‘Blood Brothers’.

   Willy Russell was born in Whiston, near Liverpool, England, in 1947. I believe that his upbringing that he had, and his social and economic circumstances greatly affected the writing of ‘Blood Brothers’. He was brought up in a poor area, in a poor family that was treated by the government very badly. We hot seated Willy Russell and found out a lot about him. We found out that he was the author of ‘Blood Brothers’ and that his parents and how they behaved greatly influenced the play because of his working class background. We then went on to find out that he studied Literature at school and achieved an ‘O’ level in the subject, the only grade that he achieved in schooling.  He hated ‘Thatcher's Britain’ because he had strong views on the working classes attempts to gain access to middle-class culture, he believed that every person should be treated the same no matter what their financial state. He believed that Margaret Thatcher helped the rich and made life difficult for the poor. These views that he had greatly affected his writing because in every play that he wrote, the poor were displayed to be courageous and battling even though they were treated badly, and the rich to have the easy life with not a care in the world and look down on the lower class.

  The second task that helped us to understand the play more was when the workshop developed to the point where we were able to build the two different households. The first household that we had to build was the Johnston house. We had to think more about what we were going to put into the house because of the poor background that the family had. They couldn’t be extravagant and had to have a cheap, rough looking sofa, a dirty unfashionable carpet and a big, old TV set. This really helped us to understand the economic issues that the Johnston family had by just letting our minds see what their home was like. You could instantly see that they couldn’t afford much and the social affect of being a single mother with only one salary coming into the family really affected them. The theme that ran their lives was that of great poverty. When we built the Lyon family house, it was a completely different story. Big, long dining table, crystal glasses and even a piano in the corner! The Lyon family was obviously the rich family of the play and they could afford to splash out on things because they had money.  

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  Hot seating Mrs Johnston really helped me to understand what life was really like for her; she struggled as a mother and provider and felt unloved and unappreciated by her rowdy family. We asked her if she was proud of her home, she said yes because everything in it, she had paid for herself and that made her feel very proud, almost as if she had achieved something.

  When we sculpted the still images inside both the families, this helped us all to understand the relationships between the characters. In the Johnston image, all the children were ...

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