Blood Brothers

GCSE: English Literature

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“Blood Brothers” is the story of twin brothers born to a working class deserted mother, Mrs Johnston. One twin is called Mickey and one is called Eddie. Mrs Johnston works as a cleaner in Mrs Lyons’ middle class home. Mrs Lyons is barren and longs for a child very much. She suggests keeping one of Mrs Johnston’s twins and raising it as her own as Mrs Johnston doesn’t have the space or money to support another child. When the children are born they are immediately separated.

Despite their mothers’ best efforts, Eddie and Mickey meet again when they are seven and become best friends and ironically “Blood Brothers.” The twins continue to meet coincidently throughout their lives until the differences in their upbringing force the friendship to end. There is, however, a last meeting where all secrets are revealed and both lives end in tragedy.

“Blood Brothers” is set in Liverpool in the 1970’s, a time of recession and high unemployment. Liverpool was greatly affected by this. Willy Russell lived through this time in a working class family which gave him the background knowledge to write about Mickey, the working class twin.

The first scene I am looking at is act 2, scene 2 and this is the first meeting since their separation at birth. The twins are now seven. We as the audience already know that the twins have met previously and the boys’ obliviousness creates tension and interest to this scene as we have had the advantage of witnessing the “adoption.” 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. He is suspicious of the sweets though because whenever he has been given sweets in the past they have been contaminated by his brother, Sammy, in numerous ways. The language spoken by each boy differs because of their upbringings. To refer to their mothers, Mickey uses “Mam” and Eddie uses “Mummy” for their titles. A swear word to the boys is very humorous and when Eddie says he will look the “F” word up in the dictionary, Mickey is clueless to what the object is.
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