The Tragic Ending
The Cyclical Structure
Blood Brothers opens with the ending. Before the audience knows anything about the characters, they see the two dead brothers lying on stage. The cyclical structure means the audience watches the entire play knowing the outcome. Every joyful moment — the childhood games, the friendship, the laughter — is shadowed by the knowledge that it will end in death. Russell uses this structure to create unbearable dramatic irony and to force the audience to ask not “what happens?” but “why does it happen?”
This structural choice is political. Russell does not want the audience to be surprised by the tragedy — he wants them to examine its causes. If the ending is inevitable, then the question becomes: what system produces this outcome? The answer, Russell insists, is class.
Russell opens the play with the twins’ deaths to make the audience focus on causes, not outcomes. The cyclical structure transforms the play from a mystery into an argument: the audience is not asking “what happens?” but “who is responsible?” Russell’s answer is the class system.
The Final Confrontation
In the final scene, Mickey discovers that Eddie is his twin brother. He also discovers that Linda has been seeing Eddie. Mickey, already broken by unemployment, depression, and antidepressants, takes a gun and confronts Eddie at the town hall where Eddie is now a councillor. The setting is significant: Eddie has moved from privilege to political power, while Mickey has moved from poverty to desperation. The physical space — a public building of authority — represents everything that separates them.
Mickey’s anguish is not about Linda. He screams: “I could have been him!” This is not jealousy over a woman — it is rage at a system that gave Eddie everything and left Mickey with nothing. Russell makes it clear that the tragedy is not caused by the love triangle but by class inequality. Mickey has been robbed not of a girlfriend but of an entire life.
In a desperate attempt to stop the violence, Mrs Johnstone finally reveals the truth: Mickey and Eddie are twins. She has kept this secret for over twenty years, controlled by Mrs Lyons’ fabricated superstition. The revelation is meant to save them — but according to the superstition, learning the truth means both must die. Mrs Johnstone’s attempt to heal the situation is what triggers the catastrophe.
Russell creates a devastating paradox: the truth should set them free, but in a society built on lies and class division, the truth destroys them. The superstition “comes true” not because of supernatural forces but because the damage done by decades of class inequality cannot be undone by a single revelation. The system has already destroyed Mickey.
Who Fires the Gun?
Mickey shoots Eddie; the police marksmen then shoot Mickey. Two guns, two deaths, seconds apart. What Russell leaves genuinely open is not who fired but where the agency behind the tragedy lies. Mickey has been stripped of work, liberty and hope long before he picks up the gun, so the ending forces the question: is Mickey the cause of these two working-class deaths, or is the system that separated the twins and denied one of them every opportunity?
The presence of police marksmen adds another layer. The state — the same system that created the inequality — delivers the final violence. Russell may be suggesting that the working class are ultimately destroyed by the institutions that were supposed to protect them.
Both twins die in the final scene: Mickey shoots Eddie, and the police marksmen then shoot Mickey. Russell’s point is not that the mechanics are unclear but that the real killer is the class system. The Narrator’s final question — “could it be what we, the English, have come to know as class?” — tells the audience exactly what Russell wants them to think.
The Narrator’s Final Question
The play ends with the Narrator addressing the audience directly: does the blame lie with superstition, or with “what we, the English, have come to know as class”? This is Russell’s thesis statement. The entire play has been building to this question, and Russell has made his preferred answer clear through every scene, character, and structural choice. The rhetorical question format is powerful: it appears to give the audience a choice, but Russell has spent the entire play demonstrating that class, not superstition, is the cause.
On the surface, the superstition “works” — the twins do die when they discover the truth. But Russell makes it impossible to ignore the material causes. Mickey is destroyed by unemployment, poverty, depression, and medication long before he picks up a gun. The superstition is a red herring — or, more precisely, it is a convenient narrative that distracts from the structural violence of the class system.
Russell is suggesting that society uses similar “superstitions” to explain away inequality: the myth of meritocracy, the idea that poverty is caused by laziness, the belief that the system is fair. These are the real superstitions — the false stories we tell ourselves to avoid confronting the truth about class.
The Audience’s Role
Russell wrote Blood Brothers for a specific audience: people who might not usually think about class inequality. The musical format makes it accessible and entertaining, but the political message is uncompromising. By the end, Russell has presented his case: identical people raised in different classes have wildly different lives and deaths. The audience leaves not just moved by a tragedy but challenged by a political argument.