Review: Blood Brothers at The Lyceum, Sheffield

From Mickey’s steely-sweet love Linda, to the desperately determined Mrs Lyons, to the force of nature that is iconic Mrs Johnstone, it’s the strong female characters who power this most tragic of tales, still looking good for its age 40 years on from the first full musical staging in Liverpool in 1983.

Willy Russell once said he was walking along one day, lifted his right foot, and before he put it down again he, amazingly, had the story for Blood Brothers.But if he’d lifted his left foot would the story have been different? That’s the question at its heart: the unknowable, toss-of-a-coin spin of fortune that takes events one way when they could have gone another.

Russell said he wanted to explore not just the debate of nature/nurture – what might happen if twins were separated and brought up on two different sides of the tracks – but the random flick of fate that brought them there.

One baby boy is plucked from his pram and taken off to a life where materially he will want for nothing. But why he, and not the other? What might have happened if the other baby boy had been lifted from the bassinet instead?

What happens in Blood Brothers is an operatic tragedy of Shakespearian proportions, set against the gritty backdrop of working-class Liverpool from the 1950s through to the 1980s.

Niki Colwell Evans plays the famous part of Mrs Johnstone, a powerhouse role taken on down the decades by Barbara Dickson, Kiki Dee, Lyn Paul, Petula Clark, Melanie Chisholm, even Carole King. At 50, and more than 11 years since she first won the role in the West End in her thirties, Evans not so much plays the part as inhabits it. She is utterly believable as the fiercely protective yet also pragmatic, strong yet chaotic, hard-done-by but with her head held high working-class woman left by her feckless husband with six mouths to feed plus twins on the way.

Evans, who came fourth on the X Factor in 2007, can really sing. Her vocals, in Easy Terms and Tell Me It’s Not True especially, bring a searing emotion to Mrs J’s struggles. Her maturity captures the hardships and even sometimes humour as she tries to provide for her children in an unequal society where the odds are stacked against them. The plot rattles briskly through the years. When we first meet Mrs J she’s in her 20s being taken dancing by an oily teddy-boy who tells her she reminds him of Marilyn Monroe.

Within minutes she’s up to her elbows in little ones and laundry, twice the size of Marilyn Monroe (as her horrible husband spits as he departs), and making a deal with the devil by giving away one of her infant twins to lonely, childless Mrs Lyons, the posh lady in the big house where she does the cleaning.

As the story unfolds – guided by a magnetic Richard Munday as a moral judge and narrator like that of Che in Evita – we’re taken on a journey through the lives of the two brothers, as their paths cross despite their different upbringings.

Sean Jones brings physical energy, puerile comedy and, later, a tragic broken spirit to the part of Mickey, and Joe Sleight is preppy perfection as naively innocent posh boy Eddie who loves everything about his uncouth new best friend – little knowing the two of them are not just blood brothers by boyish pact but by birth.

Things start to get really emotional in Act Two with the song Miss Jones (It’s Just Another Sign of the Times). It’s 1980s Thatcher’s Britain now, and Mickey and the men line up in their donkey jackets to cash their Giros having been laid off from their jobs in the factory run by Edward’s wealthy dad.

Like all Willy Russell’s works – Shirley Valentine, Educating Rita – Blood Brothers gives the story firmly to the working class, celebrates lives and otherwise unsung voices in ways so much popular culture fails to do. It’s a musical, yes, but the songs never feel unnatural or forced. There’s no stopping to applaud in between numbers. The heart-rending story marches on.

And by the time the show ends, with a standing ovation all round? There’s not a dry eye in the house.

• Blood Brothers is at The Lyceum, Sheffield, until Saturday.