In our performance of Blood Brothers I play the narrator, a nameless, ageless omen of what is to come. Throughout the play the Narrator is a constant presence used to remind the audience of what will happen to the brothers at the end of the play. When emotions are high and the audience is laughing the narrator will say something and the mood will come down because the audience will remember Mickey’s and Eddie’s fate. We feel that the original playwright intended to focus on the class and superstitious aspect of Blood Brother and whilst we are also focusing on the differences in social class between Mickey and Eddie our other main focus is the tragic aspect of the play.
We want our audience to question whether the difference between the social classes is right and we want the audience to have a strong emotional reaction to the characters’ death at the end of the play which is why we have chosen to focus on the issues of social class and the tragedy of what happened. The Narrator has no name and is referred to only as ‘narrator’ in the script , this may be because the Narrator, whilst a constant presence, is their to guide the audience through the performance.
The narrator can also be seen in some scenes to be manipulating the reactions of the characters and persuading them to act. Age also does not play a part in the narrator’s performance and his character does not develop with the emotions and progression of the show because he already knows what will happen and so he remains solemn throughout, by doing this he acts as a constant reminder of what will happen. This means that the audience can never become too comfortable with the characters of Micky and Eddie as the know what will ultimately unfold.. The Narrator does change in his performance though as during the first few scenes his attention is focuses on Mrs Lyons and Mrs Johnston and then as the play advances his attention begins to focus on the twins.
We chose scenes that we felt would best represent the advancement is Mickey and Eddie’s relationships because we don’t have a long to perform but there is quite a bit to cover. Some of the scenes we have chosen include the scene where they first meet, the scene where Eddie and Mickey are each at their respective schools, the scene where Eddies goes to university, the scene with the pills, and the final scene, in that order. Because there are such large gaps between each scene we have a narrator monologue after each scene so his can tell the audience what has happened between each scene so they don’t get confused about what’s happened. We also chose these scenes as we feel that by showing the development in their relationship the performance will have a larger emotional impact on the audience as they would have watch these two young boy grow up.
We have chosen a catwalk style performance space because we want to interact within the audience in order to maintain their audience and make them feel involved in the performance and the character’s lives so they have a stronger emotional reaction at the end of the play. A catwalk stage also allows an immediate connection between the audience and the characters. An example of our performance space is: We chose to use this type of stage as we felt it would offer us more opportunities to interact with the audience whilst still allowing the audience to see everything that’s happening.
