The phenomenal success of 'Blood Brothers' is particularly gratifying to its author Willy Russell, given the difficulties of the musical's birth. He tells how he came to musicals via hairdressing, labouring and folk songs, reports Arminta Wallace
How many times have you seen the Willy Russell musical Blood Brothers? Once? Twice? Maybe you've toyed with the idea of going, but never actually gotten around to it? Well, get this. There is, somewhere in the English midlands, a woman by the name of Julie Wakefield who has been to see the show some 1,801 - don't you just love that final "one"? - times. Of course, she has had plenty of opportunities; Blood Brothers recently received its 6,000th performance in the West End of London, while 20 years after its first night at the Liverpool Playhouse, the heart-on-the-sleeve tale of twin brothers separated at birth is still attracting bums to seats with merry regularity.
Does it make Russell feel ancient and venerable, that his play has solidified into a pillar of the theatrical establishment? "No," comes the prompt reply, the voice at the other end of the phone delivering the single syllable with an unmistakeably Scouse panache. "Because 20 years ago feels like yesterday anyway, doesn't it?"
The mention of Julie Wakefield, and the weirder side of a long run in musical theatre, makes him groan in mock despair. "Oh, do me a favour," he says, the Liverpudlian vowels fizzing down the line."No - I'm glad about it, of course I am. But I'm also quite wary of - well, of things that stay around for ever. I mean, I'm not saying Blood Brothers should close, but I wish we had a theatre in which there was a greater turnover of musicals, you know? The prevailing economics seem to be that you get a show that will cost you shedloads of money and will then stay around for long enough to recoup that money and eventually show a profit - which Blood Brothers has been doing for years now." On the other hand, the show's phenomenal success is particularly gratifying to its author - given that it had a particularly difficult birth.
"People tend to think, because it has been running for so long, that it just opened and sailed away and that was it," says Russell."It didn't. We had a very, very sticky first six weeks. The reviews were mixed, but the main thing was, the audience didn't have an idea of what the show was about - and in retrospect, I don't think the title is the best title in the world for a musical. I mean, it's fine once you've seen the show; but if you're in New York or wherever, looking down the classified ads and saying, 'Which show should we go to see?', and you spot something called Blood Brothers, it doesn't suggest a barrel of laughs, does it?"
Um, no. But then it isn't. At least, the famously cataclysmic end isn't, though there are plenty of laughs along the way - as, indeed, there are in Russell's other long-running successes, Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine. Did he have any inkling, when he was writing Blood Brothers, that he had a huge hit on his hands? Or that, 20 years on, he'd be doing "pillar of the establishment"-type interviews with foreign newspapers?
"You are joking," he says, chortling into the phone. "Apart from anything else, you'd be paralysed with fear if you felt you were taking on that kind of . . . no. You just do the best you can do at the time. Obviously, in my bones, I knew it was working as a play - although I did a massive amount of rewriting and restructuring. Even to this day I could go in and still keep rewriting, you know? But you've got to let go at some point. If I keep rewriting it, I'll bring to bear the mind of a different man, really, because of the way you change over the years. And then, things that I tried in Blood Brothers I probably wouldn't try now, because I've not got that kind of youthful chutzpah that would take those kind of risks."
Russell's own life has seen a deal of restructuring; born in 1947 in Whiston, Lancashire, he worked as a hairdresser and warehouse labourer before making his way into musical theatre by way of writing and singing folk songs. His first play, Keep Your Eyes Down, was produced in 1971; three years later, John, Paul, George, Ringo . . .and Bert was attracting quite a following, but it was Educating Rita which gave Russell his first mega-hit in 1980, followed by Blood Brothers in 1981 and Shirley Valentine in 1986. Is he irked, at all, by the way in which these latter three works dominate his production CV? "No," he says, sounding slightly scandalised by the suggestion. "I get plenty of attention for what I've done.
"Although there is a play of mine calledBreezeblock Park, which had a very difficult production experience in the West End. It opened just before Abigail's Party and it's kind of in the same territory - but I got battered by the press for having sneered at the working class. Which was not true at all, but it's very easy in the theatre to give the wrong signal, and whereas Mike Leigh got his gloriously right in Abigail's Party, I guess we got ours wrong.
"So that's a play which, for those sorts of reasons, might have been slightly overlooked. But then again I look back and I think, well, Breezeblock Park was - in a way - a play that was on the way to writing Educating Rita. A necessary stage, if you like. So maybe that's OK." After his own long and successful run in musical theatre, Russell surprised many people when, three years ago, he produced a novel, The Wrong Boy. The tale of a terminally morose Lancashire teenager by the name of Raymond Marks, it takes the form of a series of letters to Morrissy, of The Smiths fame. Why a novel? "Well, why I write anything always remains a complete and utter mystery," says Russell.
"I didn't have any desire to write a novel as an abstract thing. But my son was a huge Smiths and Morrissy fan, and one night he was at work alongside me with his drawing board with a friend of his. I wrote the first page as an amusement for Rob and his mate, and read it to them, and they were amused. But I discovered I had a character that I was really, really interested in - and wanted to spend a great deal more time with."
Such is the way of the media world that Raymond may shortly join Rita and Co on either stage or screen - or both. "I have my doubts about doing it as a movie - to cram a 506-page story into a two-hour film means you have to strip a huge amount away," says Russell. "And what would have to go is the tone, the humour - so what you're left with, if you do that, is a grief-fest. And I don't go to grief-fests. I'm not interested. It happened to Angela's Ashes. I adored that book. I pissed myself when reading it. I mean, I know this is a sore point, because I know it really divided people in Ireland - but my take on it was that it was a hysterically funny book. That in the midst of all this misery there was a wonderful language in which the misery was dealt with and, to some extent, exorcised."
Raymond's appalling tale, he says, needs to be told in a similarly multi-layered way. "It would be more suited to the stage, because the stage is a much more poetic medium than film, which is very literal - but I don't know how to get it on to the stage, so I'm currently thinking of doing it as a TV series." With a Smiths soundtrack, presumably: which is, for those who read The Wrong Boy and and loved every shudderingly miserable page, something to look forward to. Oh, and if you haven't seen Blood Brothers yet - or if you've only seen it once, twice, or a mere half-dozen times - it opens at the Cork Opera House tonight for a two-week run before moving to the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin for five weeks, beginning on February 4th.
