Character Analysis
Mrs Johnstone: The Heart of the Play
Mrs Johnstone is Russell’s most sympathetic creation. She is warm, loving, resilient and deeply superstitious. She dances, she sings, she tells her children stories. But she is also powerless. Her husband leaves her, her employer manipulates her, the debt collectors humiliate her, and the system offers her nothing. Russell positions her as the play’s moral centre — the audience loves her, and that love makes the tragedy unbearable.
Her key quotation is the song “Marilyn Monroe,” which reveals a woman whose youthful dreams have been crushed. The comparison to Monroe is doubly ironic: Monroe was glamorous but died tragically, and Mrs Johnstone is warm but will lose both sons. Her final song, “Tell Me It’s Not True,” is a lament of raw, impossible grief. Russell bookends the play with her songs to show that Mrs Johnstone’s suffering is the emotional spine of the entire story.
Mrs Johnstone is warm (she loves her children fiercely), superstitious (she believes in omens and the twin curse), and powerless (she has no money, no rights, no recourse). Russell gives her these qualities to ensure the audience blames the system, not the mother. She is not a bad parent — she is a good parent in an impossible situation.
Mrs Lyons: Guilt, Paranoia & Destruction
Mrs Lyons begins the play as a calculating manipulator. She exploits Mrs Johnstone’s poverty and superstition to take Edward. But as the play progresses, Mrs Lyons is consumed by the very superstition she invented. She becomes paranoid that the twins will discover the truth, and her fear drives her to increasingly extreme behaviour: she fires Mrs Johnstone, she slaps Edward, she spies on him, and finally she attempts to stab Mrs Johnstone with a kitchen knife.
Russell uses Mrs Lyons to show that the class system damages everyone — even the privileged. She has wealth, a big house, and social status, but she has no peace. Her guilt and paranoia make her more miserable than Mrs Johnstone, who at least has genuine love and warmth. Mrs Lyons is not a villain in the traditional sense; she is a woman driven mad by the consequences of her own manipulation. Russell shows that taking another woman’s child cannot bring happiness — it brings only fear.
Mickey is the play’s tragic hero. As a child, he is loud, funny and full of life. As a teenager, he is insecure and envious. As an adult, he is unemployed, depressed and dependent on pills. His arc is a systematic destruction of potential by the class system. His key line — “I could have been him!” — reveals that Mickey understands the injustice but can do nothing about it. The tragedy is not that Mickey fails; it is that the system never gave him a chance to succeed.
Eddie is Mickey’s mirror image. He is confident, articulate and generous — qualities that come not from superior genetics but from superior nurture. He goes to boarding school, university, and becomes a councillor. He is genuinely kind: he tries to help Linda and Mickey with housing. But his kindness cannot bridge the class divide. His affair with Linda is born from compassion, but it triggers the catastrophe. Eddie is not a villain — he is a good person whose privilege inadvertently destroys the brother he never knew he had.
Linda: More Than a Love Interest
Linda is often reduced to “the girl between two brothers,” but Russell writes her with more complexity. As a child, she is the boldest of the three — she dares the boys into throwing stones at windows, she stands up to bullies, she leads the games. As a teenager, she is confident and attractive. As an adult, she marries Mickey out of genuine love and loyalty. When Mickey collapses into depression, Linda does not abandon him — she begs him to stop the pills, she supports the family, she holds everything together.
Her affair with Eddie is born from desperation, not betrayal. Mickey is unreachable, and Linda needs someone who can talk to her, help her, and see her. Russell ensures the audience understands that Linda is another victim of the class system. If Mickey had not been destroyed by unemployment and prison, the affair would never have happened. Linda’s tragedy is that she is punished for seeking the emotional connection that poverty denied her husband.
The Narrator is not a traditional character — he is a dramatic device. He functions as a Greek chorus, a fate figure, and a conscience. His repeated line “shoes upon the table” creates a rhythm of foreboding throughout the play. His final question (“superstition or class?”) is Russell’s voice speaking directly to the audience.
Sammy is the character the audience is most tempted to judge — he is violent, criminal, and destructive. But Russell includes him as a warning, not a villain. Sammy is the product of the same environment as Mickey: the same poverty, the same chaotic household, the same failing school. The only difference is that Sammy responded to deprivation with aggression rather than resilience.
Sammy’s importance is structural. He is the person who hides the gun under the floor that Mickey later takes. He is the person who draws Mickey into the robbery that leads to prison. Without Sammy, Mickey might have survived his unemployment and depression. Russell uses Sammy to show how poverty creates a chain of destruction: one brother’s crime becomes another brother’s downfall. If the Johnstones had been middle-class, Sammy would have been a mischievous schoolboy, not an armed robber.