Lyn Paul, who liked to teach the world to sing with The New Seekers, has a good stab at Mrs Johnstone, who gives away one of her twins to the woman whose house she cleans. She can never let go, and the boys keep seeing each other. The show is either starkly tragic or frankly implausible, I'm not sure which. Andy Snowden as poverty-bound Mickey and Mark Hutchinson as privileged Eddle graduate with thudding obviousness, to criminality and the local council. The show had innocence and terror 15 years ago.
Every performance is greeted with a standing ovation.
Like Shakespeare's Hermia I am amazed and know not what to say. Emerging during the decade that landed us with Cats and Starlight Express , Blood Brothers was always something of an anomaly as an Eighties musical. It dealt with ordinary, recognised people, for a start, rather than a menage of poetic moggies or a set of singing choo-choos. Adroitly entwining the culturally specific and the mythic, the show expresses pain at the human devastation caused by Thatcherite economics via a folk-tale plot about the bond over two decades between twins who are separated at birth, brought up on different sides of the Liverpudlian class divide, and apprised of their true relationship only at the tragic denouement. The show has become a kind of life-support machine for the careers of erstwhile pop stars.