Characters: Mickey, Edward, Mrs Johnstone, Mrs Lyons
A Cast Built Around Contrast
Blood Brothers is a play built on pairing. Every major character exists in relationship to their opposite: Mickey, the working-class twin, placed beside Edward, his middle-class brother; Mrs Johnstone’s warm, exhausted love beside Mrs Lyons’s anxious, controlling longing. Understanding how to perform these characters is inseparable from understanding what they represent. When a performer makes gestus choices for Mickey and Edward, they are simultaneously making arguments about class.
Mickey Johnstone
Mickey is the emotional heart of the play. As a child, he is quick, curious, foul-mouthed and funny — a working-class boy who has learned to find pleasure in the limited world of his street. As a teenager, he is awkward and infatuated with Linda. As an adult, he is unemployed, depressed and eventually imprisoned. The arc is from joyful energy to crushed stillness, and a performer must make that arc legible through specific choices at each stage.
Physically, the child Mickey should have a loose, impulsive quality: quick direction changes, a low centre of gravity, hands constantly busy. By the depression scenes of Act Two, that same body should feel heavy and constricted — slow movements, sunken posture, a voice that has lost its colour and pace. On stage, the transition is achieved not through a costume change alone but through physical characterisation. The adult Mickey’s proxemics relative to Linda and Edward in the final confrontation should communicate isolation: if Edward is central and commanding, Mickey is peripheral and cornered.
Mickey’s arc is from working-class vitality to social entrapment. The physical journey — loose, energetic child to slow, heavy adult — communicates Russell’s argument that the class system, not personal weakness, is responsible for Mickey’s destruction.
Edward Lyons
Edward is the same biology as Mickey but a different upbringing entirely. Raised in a large house with books and educational opportunity, he speaks in RP (Received Pronunciation), uses formal vocabulary and carries the easy confidence of someone who has never been told their prospects are limited. As a performer, the key challenge with Edward is to make him genuinely warm and likeable rather than simply a symbol of privilege, or the friendship between the brothers will feel implausible. His physical posture should be upright, open and unhurried — not stiff or snobbish, but belonging to someone with no reason to be guarded.
The contrast between Mickey’s Liverpudlian dialect and Edward’s RP is a central theatrical language. A sound designer should consider whether a soundscape or underscore in the childhood scenes reinforces the warmth of the friendship across that divide, or whether the contrast should feel more pronounced and uncomfortable by Act Two.
Mrs Johnstone
Mrs Johnstone is the play’s moral centre. She is a single mother of seven — later nine — exhausted, behind with the hire purchase, still humming Marilyn Monroe songs because she holds onto the idea that life could be beautiful. Russell asks the audience to love and pity her simultaneously. When she gives up one twin, she does so out of desperation, not cruelty, and the audience must feel that gap between her intent and the consequences.
As a performer, Mrs Johnstone requires extraordinary vocal range. She sings through some of her most painful moments; the songs are not relief from grief but a way of bearing it. In the scenes where she makes the deal with Mrs Lyons, a performer might choose a low, quiet vocal register — someone speaking who doesn’t quite believe her own words. Her proxemics relative to Mrs Lyons in this scene should show social submission: she may be physically smaller on stage, seated while Mrs Lyons stands, positioned towards the edge of the acting space while Mrs Lyons occupies centre.
A costume designer working on Mrs Johnstone might use the visual vocabulary of 1960s Liverpudlian working-class life: worn fabrics, faded floral prints, practical but not fashionable. The fit of the clothes might suggest she has little money for new ones; alterations and visible repairs become design language. This contrasts directly with Mrs Lyons, whose costume should communicate affluence through fabric quality (wool, structured tailoring), clean lines and the absence of visible wear. The two women standing together should read as a class map even before they speak.
Mrs Lyons
Mrs Lyons is a more complicated figure than a simple villain. She cannot have children and she wants one desperately. When she persuades Mrs Johnstone to give up a twin, she is acting from real longing, not purely from selfishness. However, her means are manipulative: she exploits Mrs Johnstone’s superstition about the shoes-on-the-table curse, turning a folk belief into a weapon of social control. As she grows more anxious about the truth being revealed, she becomes increasingly unstable — eventually violent.
A performer playing Mrs Lyons must find the genuine pain underneath the control. Her proxemics should change over the course of the play: early on she is composed, her posture upright and assured; by the later scenes, her movements might become tighter, more restless, with sudden bursts of physicality that signal the loss of control underneath the bourgeois surface. Vocally, she begins measured and persuasive; by Act Two, her pitch rises and her pace becomes erratic.
Mrs Lyons uses Mrs Johnstone’s belief in a local superstition to coerce her silence. This moment is central to the play’s exploration of how the powerful manipulate the powerless — and a director should treat it as a key staging moment, not a throwaway exchange.
A common student error is to describe Mickey as “representing the working class” and Edward as “representing the middle class” and leave it there. This is insufficient for an 8 or 12-mark question. The question is asking how you would perform or design these characters as specific people in specific moments — not as walking symbols. Mickey’s depression in Act Two is not just “what happens to working-class people”; it is a specific person in a specific physical and emotional state. Describe the vocal pitch, the pace, the posture, the proxemics for that named moment. Then, and only then, link it to the theme.