Review: Blood Brothers at the Liverpool Empire ****1/2

You wait ages for one Willy Russell play – and then two come along at the same time!

With Shirley Valentine back at the Everyman and Blood Brothers returning to the Empire, all it needed was for the Royal Court to have revived Stags and Hens or One for the Road and we’d have had a full-blown Willy Russell season on our hands in Liverpool this spring.

While Russell’s tale of the Johnstone twins started life at the Playhouse, it’s become synonymous with the Empire – and all but one of the productions which have graced the theatre’s capacious stage over the past 40 years have come from Bill Kenwright.

The man himself was always in attendance, like a proud parent, the last time being in October 2022, less than a year before he passed away.

He would have loved this latest visit, not least because it coincides with the Empire’s centenary week, and despite the story’s tragic arc there was a distinctly celebratory atmosphere inside and outside the auditorium on opening night, with a bust of the Liverpool producer unveiled in the foyer, bags and playbills on every seat and more than one Mrs J in the building.

Kenwright would also have appreciated the performances from the cast of this latest tour, led – as it was in 2022 – by Niki Colwell Evans as Mrs Johnstone.

Evans skilfully navigates a path from sunny optimism to heart-rending despair as her exhausted matriarch struggles to raise her huge and wayward brood after their feckless father does a bunk.

She mines the character’s quiet sense of desperation and delivers Mrs Johnstone’s many musical numbers with power and a quiet passion.

The anthem Tell Me It’s Not True may be the headline number, and here it’s imbued with plenty of punch-in-the-gut emotion, but for me personally, the exquisite Easy Terms is the star of the show and Evans, complemented by James Barber’s acoustic guitar, absolutely smashed it.

Above: The cast of Blood Brothers. Top: Sean Jones and Joe Sleight as Mickey and Eddie. Photos by Jack Merriman.

Three years ago, Sean Jones was on what was described as his farewell tour after the best part of 25 years playing Mickey. But it’s a gift of a role, and evidently one that’s hard to relinquish because he’s back in baggy jumper and dirty knees as the irrepressible scamp who is eventually beaten down by the cards he’s been dealt – with terrible consequences.

It’s a bravura performance which shifts incrementally from delightful effervescence to monosyllabic melancholy.

But beside him, Joe Sleight more than holds his own in as Mickey’s ‘twinnie’ Eddie who is spirited away in a diabolical deal, a duplicitous heist really, by Sarah Jane Buckley’s well-to-do Mrs Lyons.

Together the pair create a joyous partnership.

Mention however must also go to Liverpool’s Gemma Brodrick who shines as Linda, the childhood playmate who finds herself in the middle of an emotional – and ultimately destructive – fraternal tug-of-war.

Meanwhile Sean Keany maintains a suitably malevolent, shadowy presence as the Narrator (a role Russell found himself playing on stage at the Empire back in 1984 in the only-non Kenwright tour of the show).

It's not all doom and gloom of course, and alongside Jones's livewire act as Mickey, the energetic ensemble revel in the story's many comical moments, while Russell's superlative soundtrack is given rousing treatment by cast and band.