Vivienne Carlyle’s Mrs Johnstone and Sean Jones’s Mickey in Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers, on tour at the Grand Opera House, York. Picture: Jack Merriman
WILLY Russell’s tragi-comic Liverpool musical is visiting York for a remarkable tenth time since 1996. No show can rival that record, not even fellow regulars The Rocky Horror Show or Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story.
Ticket demand is as high as ever: Monday’s press night was packed to the gills, opening a week’s run that accommodates three rather than the routine two matinees (Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday).
Should you somehow still be a Blood Brothers virgin, make sure to initiate yourself in Russell’s modern-day Jacobean tragedy on its first York outing since 2022, when your reviewer considered the combination of Niki Evans’s Mrs Johnstone, Sean Jones’s Mickey, in his “last ever tour”, Joel Benedict’s Eddie, Carly Burns’s Linda and Robbie Scotcher’s Narrator to be “better than ever”.
The 2025 leads are more than a match, especially Scottish actress Vivienne Carlyle’s Mrs Johnston, with a singing voice to rival Annie Lennox, and Sean Keany’s tall, gaunt grim reaper of an Irish-accented Narrator. Sean Jones, meanwhile, has still not left the building – was he taking the Mickey when he said 2022‘s tour would be the final curtain after 23 years on and off in Blood Brothers’ baggy green jumper and short trousers?! – but why would he leave a role he has made his own?
At 54, Jones continues to pour blood, sweat and tears into his combustible combination of bouncy comic timing [as seen each winter in his daft lad role in the Florian Pavilion, New Brighton panto too] and heartrending pathos on Mickey’s doomed path from skip to slouch to slump, from cheeky, boundlessly energetic child to lovelorn, tongue-tied teen, to crushed, enervated adult, broken on the wheel of anti-depressants and redundancy.
Impresario and producer Bill Kenwright – who had asked Jones to return to the role in 2022 – has passed away since that tour but the 2025 production still carries his stamp, credited as co-director with Bob Tomson, the team that brought Russell’s Blood Brothers to its emotional heights with gold standard production values to boot.
Vivienne Carlyle first worked with Kenwright and Tomson in 2006, playing Mrs Lyons and understudying Mrs J at the Phoenix Theatre in London, later appearing as Mrs Lyons at the Grand Opera House on tour in 2008, and she now returns to Mrs J after a 12-year gap, bringing scabrous Scouse humour, love, fierce passion, desperate resilience and guilty pain to the secret-burdened Catholic mother at the heart of Russell’s1983 cautionary tale of twin brothers separated at birth and cursed by a fateful superstition that if either should discover the other’s existence, they will die instantly.
Already struggling with too many children on an impoverished Liverpool estate and deserted by her wastrel husband, Mrs J’s budget on the never-never means she can only “afford” one child more, not two, and so cleaner Mrs J rashly enters a pact with her employer, a travelling salesman’s barren wife, Mrs Lyons (Sarah Jane Buckley), to give her the choice of the twins.
Whereupon, seen from the age of seven upwards, Jones’s scally urchin Mickey and Joe Sleight’s initially naïve, then scholarly Eddie are divided by the class divide that Russell lambasts, but their paths are destined to keep crossing, as fate plays its hand as much as social circumstance, turning their “blood brother” bond in adolescent rites of passage to adult separation.
Ever present in the shadows on Andy Walmsley’s set of house frontages, a mezzanine level and backdrops of Liverpool Liver Building skyscraper and the verdant countryside is Keany’s Narrator, a Faustian debt collector as dark as his suit and tie, overseeing innocent child’s play making way for crime and tragic final resolution, guns turning from toys to real.
From Vivienne Carlyle’s renditions of Tell Me It’s Not True, Marilyn Monroe and Easy Terms to Gemma Brodrick’s lovely performance as teen crush Linda, caught between Mickey and Eddie, to Nick Richings’ lighting and Matt Malone’s band, the 2025 tour of Blood Brothers shines with high quality in the transition from comedy to tragedy, the two faces of theatre writ large in this peerless, hard-hitting, unsentimental yet emotionally shattering musical.
Bill Kenwright Ltd presents Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers, Grand Opera House, York, until Saturday, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm Thursday and Saturday matinees. Box office: atgtickets.com/York. Age recommendation: 12 plus.
