Blood Brothers Superstition

Blood Brothers Superstition

Blood Brothers superstition essay
Superstition is no doubt an important theme in the play ’Blood Brothers’. It is used as a literacy device to maintain tension and excitement after the narrator starts the play, revealing the ending. It allows us to see how the character of Mrs. Lyons is taken over by guilt and paranoia as she becomes superstitious as the play developes e.g when she rushes to Mr. Lyons and sweeps the shoes off the table. The very idea of superstition is that through an action you draw back luck to yourself and this is shown throughout the play as the deal, at the beginning and Mrs. Lyons words ‘you must never tell anyone about this, Mrs Johnstone, because if you do you will kill them’ almost becomes a curse that is justified through the final eventuality of the twins and we feel through Mrs. Lyons trying to manipulate something beyond her control she does indeed draw bad luck to herself.
However, I do not feel that superstition was the cause for Mickey and Edward’s death, nor do I feel that Willy Russel wanted us to think that. He finishes the play by asking ’or could it be what we the English have come to know as social class.’ Through this rhetorical question, he wants us to reflect on the deterioration of Mickey’s character, how their upbringing differed and how the ending of the play and this awful tragic eventuality was inevitable due to social class. He wanted people to question society and class, and I believe these were the main intentions of his play. The play was written in 1981 and set in Liverpool in order for Russell to target unemployment in Britain: Liverpool had one of the highest levels of unemployment in the developed world – 25% of the workforce out of a job. It was a time where Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party believed anyone who chose to work could be successful. Yet in Blood Brothers Russel contradicts this belief and shows this using the parallel of twins, how some people’s lives are inevitably not going to...

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