Blood Brothers Play Guide for AQA GCSE Drama

COMPONENT 1 UNDERSTANDING DRAMA 32 Willy Russell and the contexts behind his playwriting The award-winning playwright, Willy Russell is known for many popular plays including Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine as well as Blood Brothers . He is widely admired for his insightful portrayals of working-class characters, in particular, strong, independent-minded women, and for his exploration of themes such as social class and education. The following are excerpts from an interview that Angela Levin conducted with Willy Russell for the Telegraph newspaper in 2012. Jodie Prenger in Shirley Valentine 5 CHECK IT OUT For more on the context of Blood Brothers , see page 53 of AQA GCSE Drama . Task B6 Re-read the excerpts from the interview and highlight points that you think are relevant to Blood Brothers . Then answer these questions. 1 Where did Willy Russell grow up? 2 What similarities are there between his life and the characters in Blood Brothers ? 3 What inspired him to write Blood Brothers ? 4 Russell is admired for his sympathetic portrayal of strong female characters. What in his background might have inspired this? Willy Russell: ‘I want to talk about things that matter’ [Willy Russell’s] own story is as powerful as any fiction. An only child, he was born in Whiston, near Liverpool, to a working-class couple who had little in common. ‘It was a phenomenally tense situation at home because my parents wanted different things from life,’ he recalls... He believes that spending so much time with his mother, aunts and grandmother developed his understanding of women and of how to write convincing female characters. ‘When I was 11 I was at quite a rough school, but we used to read one-act plays, and one about two babies switched at birth stayed with me. I thought a lot about what might happen to each of them, and it became the seed for Blood Brothers . (Please write that it absolutely isn’t based on the 1844 novella The Corsican Brothers by Alexandre Dumas, as written in Wikipedia!)’ ‘I am very interested in nature versus nurture. When I look at myself or catch sight of a gesture I make and see my father… I also know I might have drunk myself to death at 30. Luckily, I was saved by my in-laws, who nurtured me.’ Russell left school at 15 with one O-level in English literature and, at his mother’s suggestion, became a hairdresser. He also wrote songs and set up a group... ‘Meeting Annie’s [his wife’s] family was a massive influence in my life. One day her mother Margaret, who knew I hated hairdressing, said if I didn’t want to do it all my life, what was I going to do about it? I said I wanted to teach because I could then write in the holidays. She explained that I needed five O-levels, and suggested I went to night school. I was 20 and took her advice.’ Russell became a teacher in Toxteth, but within a year was writing full time...