Review by Simon Jenner, February 10 2026
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
“What the English call class.” Something’s happened to Willy Russell’s 1983 perennial Blood Brothers if you’ve seen it before. With the 2023 production and strikingly this one, with some cast returning, it’s more starkly devastating. The force of Greek tragedy’s scored with even greater clarity than 2023. Willy Russell’s music and lyrics scratch class-divisions with storytelling, nail tenderness on tenement walls. Though the late Bill Kenwright is still named co-director – with Bob Tomson and resident director Tim Churchill – a fresh spirit guides the work. Kenwright’s company produces this revival of Blood Brothers, arriving at Theatre Royal Brighton till February 14.
Blood Brothers with its defiant nurture-over-nature message burns even brighter now. That a single wrong-way move shunts you down if you’re from the wrong class track. How prison and medication destroy you. Blood Brothers hits so many truths on the wing and sings them back to you.
Vivienne Carlyle fresh from the Phoenix Theatre run now takes Mrs Johnstone. She brings more clarity than ever before, the hallmark of this production. Carlyle zeroes her voice to live along the words, with a quick skirl. She sings wonderfully though lets the line look after itself blazing truth with her acting.
Vivienne Carlyle and Sean Jones – Blood Brothers UK Tour 2026 – Photo Credit Jack Merriman
It’s designed as before by Andy Walmsley; still a simple set with green-door tenements in either side (latterly modernised), one with salubrious extensions and a backdrop shifting from wintry Merseyside lights to countryside. A gantry’s rarely used; there’s a few balcony takes to emphasize class. The set’s the one element that’s not developed. Nick Richings’ now slightly enhanced lighting serves climactic moments, filtered through a mesh effect to bead darkness: everything’s pitched at a hallucinatory naturalism.
Whereas Carlyle anchors with throbbing tough-love compassion, the trio of younger actors growing-up is revelatory in their whoop of childhood. There’s even more vivacity in the ensemble’s children’s games. The child who stayed, Mickey, is vibrancy personified, slowly harrowed. Returning to the role, Sean Jones produces a masterclass as the winning, hapless madcap growing-up and shrivelling down vocally (high tenor to raspy bass). I doubt if anyone‘s matched Jones with his physical precision; from ebullience to shrunken drug-dependant hollowness, slowed, ashen with premature age. Jones even enacts the pseudo-Parkinsons of anti-psychotic drugs.
Another returning to his role is Joe Sleight: a superb light tenor as Eddie. He’s precise, naïve, eager to love, affecting. Also returning is Gemma Brodrick’s Linda, making a winning vocal and acting transition: from confident child to sexy, competent – and vulnerable – young woman.
Richard Munday’s ominous Narrator nudges the drama even further on, perhaps darker than previous narrators. His lean delivery’s one-third-devil, one-third-enabler, one-third-conscience. Laura Harrison as Mrs Lyons now quivers with spite and foreboding, if marginally more sympathetic than some I’ve seen.
The epilogue’s played out at the beginning; the fable of the Johnstone twins unfolds to partly banish, partly reinforce our sense of that massive reveal.
It’s the 1950s. Mrs Johnstone – we never learn her first name – is courted (“Dancing”) married, has seven children by a man who abandons her before her eighth and as it happens ninth child arrives. She can’t feed twins and the childless woman she cleans for, Harrison’s twittery well-to-do Mrs Lyons, offers her a way out: give one child to her. But she makes Mrs Johnstone swear she’ll never reveal the truth. So Mr Lyons away for nine months will think it’s theirs.
So twins are sundered; when Mrs Lyons meanly cuts out Mrs Johnstone from any contact, the twins’ separation and fateful reunion, their amity and growing apart, plays out against starkly different class aspirations. And centred on the same girl, Linda.
This ‘folk opera’ is Brechtian (and Greek) by way of Stratford East and Joan Littlewood, with Russell’s pithy lyrics married to indelible melodies (often same but varied): the “Marilyn Monroe” refrain which might seem strained as a catch-all but twists to ingenious ends, including medication. Duets like “My Child” where real and faux mothers sing different feelings; the bittersweet realism of “Easy Terms” taking on meanings as Carlyle commands with clarity and delicacy – as bailiffs repossess every stitch of Hire-Purchase furniture.
Laura Harrison and Richard Munday – Blood Brothers UK Tour 2026 – Photo Credit Jack Merriman
Munday’s smoky localism dogs the protagonists’ shadows, with regret (if the fateful trio could just stay eighteen) and a whiff of brimstone as he keeps intoning the devil with “Shoes Upon the Table” to minor chord disruptions (there’s a bit of Mahler in the orchestration sometimes). His voice cuts through smokiness, edging to Mephistopholean as he reminds each character there’s an account to pay after swearing oaths and curses.
The baleful influence of Mickey’s gun-happy workshy elder brother Sammy (Michael Gillette’s rangy menace bops anger) pushes Jones’s Mickey further away from a chance of squaring with life. But more decisive is what life and unemployment do to him. It corrodes his relationship with ‘blood brother’ Eddie, and new wife Linda.
Sleight’s Eddie can seem childlike yet transforms cut-glass-class to well-intentioned flop-haired councillor. Like Jones and Brodrick, his growing-up is (with Carlyle) the great acting of the night. His fateful attraction to Linda shows his true worth (he cares nothing for snobby uni friends) and fragility. Songs he shares with Jones, “Long Sunday Afternoon” and later “That Guy” are winningly matched.
Brodrick too shares in this growing and her vocal transformation is matched by an ardent high soprano that nails strength and vulnerability, worn down beyond her quiet heroism. From the girl who always strikes her target, to one who fatefully strikes two, it’s her tragedy too.
Harrison’s Mrs Lyons as thankless near-villain duets with Carlyle with a rich harmony between them; her terrified meanness is understandable. Mrs Lyons’ identity is bound by a secret. Harrison shows Lyons falling apart slowly as crumpled paranoia and guilt-steeped slashes of anger seamlessly erupt from her.
Tim Churchill returns as bland paternalist Mr Lyons. Churchill’s unctuousness suggests a platonic pipe-clamping moment. Seasoned, Churchill’s long been entrusted as resident director on tour. Francesca Benton-Stace whether pregnant older sister or Mrs Jones ordered to fire everyone then herself has a strong lyric moment.
Danny Knott’s Perkins cold-and-hot milkman (with a delicious fourth-wall as gynaecologist), and Dominic Gore as Neighbour also impress. Latesha Karisa as schoolfriend-turned-smug-student Brenda, and Graeme Kinniburgh returns as obstreperous Bus Conductor. Like Alex Harland’s authority-roles as teacher and policeman each marks their territory.
Matt Malone’s music direction and pit-band sound is superbly punchy, percussive, creating off-chords of fateful motifs. Dan Samson’s sound amplifies this to a always-musical crump of decibels.
The show runs for two-hours-fifty. It never for a moment seems it, gripping the audience so tightly that after the great peroration “Tell Me It’s Not True” reprises the audience roars. Carlyle burns through singing to a broken majesty, possessed by Mrs Johnstone. This reinvigorated classic has overwhelming impact: as story, as lyric fable, as terrible moral for these distracted times. This is the production to see.
Musical Director/Keyboards a Matt Malone. Assistant MD/Keyboard 2 Ben Payne, Guitars James Barber, Bass Glenn Muscroft, Drums Jon Hooper, Soprano & Alto Saxophone Richard Wimpenny, Trumpets Sam Pierce.
CSM Harriet Saffin, DSM Andrew Holton, ASM/Book Elle Roberts, Tech SM Rhys Lee-Whellams, Head of Wardrobe David Hoy, Sound No 1 Bo Collier, Sound No. 2 Ashley Hagyard, Technical Swing Philip Conlon, Lighting No. 1 Robert Garnham, Lighting No 2 Charlotte Mayers-Jones, Lighting No. 3 Alasdair Hood, Production Carpenter Maitland Wakefield, Production Electrician James Chant, Production Sound Engineer Dave Preece.
2026 Company – Blood Brothers UK Tour 2026 – Photo Credit Jack Merriman
