Blood Brothers at the Millennium Forum - review by Darinagh Boyle

BLOOD BROTHERS AT THE MILLENNIUM FORUM (REVIEW)

BY DARINAGH BOYLE With its recessed bookcase, window nets and chinoise wallpaper, the curtain lifts on a cosy middle-class mid-century interior. But once hardscrabble mum of seven, Mrs Johnstone, stumbles into a hasty pact with her childless employer - no one is coming out of the Lyon’s den unscathed.

Willy Russell’s powerful morality tale is told anew at Derry’s Millennium Forum this week – at a time when multimillionaires govern ever poorer people, when poverty and picket lines grow by the day and inflation puts everyday essentials out of ordinary families’ reach.

With its thumping heart-rending score, dancy suck-you-in melodies, spit and snot humour and outstandingly professional performances - Blood Brothers has all the elements of a great night’s entertainment.

Whether you call it fate or just getting your comeuppance, right from the start something inevitable this way comes, stalking the lead characters like the ominous new shoes plonked on the table by the supercilious Mrs Lyons.

But it’s the poor and vulnerable who ultimately pay the highest price and bear the deepest shame. Was it ever other?

So when the emotional depth charges begin to drop nonchalantly – menace, foreboding, the sour aftertaste of regret puncture the knockabout antics set in everyman Scouse-street.

Tinkley melodies drift and deliver doom-laden lyrics, “His mind’s gone dancing” among many catchy bittersweet riffs.

And a bobby on the beat’s words hang suspended for a second – “he should be mixing with his own kind, Mr Lyons” – before the dice rolls again.

But it’s Shoes Upon the Table and Gipsies in the Wood, both delivered by the sensationally exacting narrator in the role of a one-man Greek chorus, that drip with the bitterness and foreboding of an outstanding debt that will be settled.

So by the time Edward accepts the locket, a talisman of love as well as secrecy, the audience knows a big bang reveal is on the cards.

Yep, we all know it’s coming, it’s creeping up our hall, it’s shadowing our every move (after all the show opened with a double fatality crime scene and a prologue that told us of a pair birthed and dead on the same day).

But all that knowing didn’t stop Tuesday night’s audience to a man, woman and teen, collectively jump when shots crack out in a packed auditorium.

Disappointment and hope, love, betrayal, destiny and superstition, new beginnings and old insecurities haunt the dialogue casting the spectre of Marilyn Monroe against the enveloping gloom.

Somewhere in the second half, tomfoolery and teen love give way to darker elements – redundancy, extortion, guns, jail and drugs. And the privileges of class and money are more sharply drawn.

In the prison scene the action is confined within a wall-less box. Entrapped by circumstances and despair, Mickey talks to his wife both caged by a single light effect within the shadow of a barred window projected on to the stage. The claustrophobic atmosphere of inner city tenements, once jovial and naïve in its intimacy - is suddenly suffocating. On his release Mickey is no less imprisoned, this time in a self-made dungeon of pity, guilt, resentment and drug dependency.

Mrs Johnstone herself (Rebecca Storm) turns in an exemplary performance, her voice at times restrained, at times sinewy, and freighted with emotion.

But to be fair, there isn’t one under-par performance in this magnificent production.

A live orchestra adds an unmistakable piquancy to the most moving scenes, arguably as vital as any of the lead performances or gripping confrontations.

And scene changes are slick and unobtrusive, a credit to the backstage crew and technical staff.

But it’s the show-stealing crescendo at the end of this Blood Brothers production that evokes a sense of tragic waste, of the menace of secrets, above all - of the pain of unnecessary loss.

If it does feel slightly clichéd at times, these unmistakable truths save it from schmaltz to resonate loudly in the here and now.

It’s bleedin’ cracker, is Blood Brothers.