Few musicals have received such acclaim as the multi-award winning Blood Brothers - a show which played for more than 10,000 performances in London's West End, as well as embarking on multiple UK and Ireland tours. Written by Willy Russell, the themes within this stunning musical are still as prevalent as they were back when it was written in 1981. As the show makes its rounds visiting an incredible array of UK and Ireland theatres, we spoke to Ben Mabberley who is currently starring in the show as Perkins and Understudy Eddie to tell us more.
Q) Before we begin, please could you introduce yourself and tell us about your character?
Ben: My name is Ben Mabberley, I play a character called Perkins and I cover the role of Eddie in Blood Brothers. I've been on tour now with the show for about three months.
Q) How are you finding the experience of being on tour with Blood Brothers?
Ben: It's been absolutely lovely. It's such a lovely piece. Some pieces of theatre are made to be kind of escapism or meant to be a bit more of a party. But this show has a real strong message behind it and that's the kind of theatre that I really enjoy making, so it's been a real joy. And it's just as relevant kind of 40 years later, as it was 40 years ago when Willy Russell first wrote it.
Q) Can you tell us a little bit more about how you got involved in the show? How was the audition process?
Ben: Funnily enough, I was doing some teaching work in Saudi Arabia earlier this year. And I was with my friend, Carly Burns, who I done a show with previously, she was also out with me. And she played Linda a few tours ago. When I got the audition through, on the materials was Carly's recording of the show and she would also, she would be on the bus on the way to work one day and she said about a week before I got the audition, "Ben, you should do Blood Brothers, it's up your street, I think you'd quite enjoy it" a week later, the audition was in my inbox. A really coincidence, really funny.
Q) Speaking of coincidences and superstitions, a huge theme in the show. Would you say you're a superstitious person?
Ben: Not particularly, but in the theatre just yesterday, there was a ladder just off the stage and it was by some of the steps, and I was very tempted to just go underneath the ladder and then go up the steps. Then I stopped myself and went "no, no, can't do that in a theatre." Also, maybe I am a little bit superstitious about saying, see I don't even want to say it now, the name of the Scottish play backstage in a theatre. I still won't do that - there's something in me that won't allow me to do it. When I was younger, I was doing a youth production and I think someone was doing it deliberately, but then I think a light did catch on fire. These superstitions are not to be meddled with.
Oviya: So what I'm taking from this is... no, but definitely yes.
Ben: No, but definitely yes.... yes. Also, with that one, do you know about the whistling thing in theatres? So, it's bad luck to whistle in a theatre. Because, in the olden days, if you needed someone to bring down the flies, you'd whistle. That was the way of communicating with the fly operators to get them to bring in the next bit of set. So if you accidentally whistled on stage, there was a high chance that something could just drop on your head, because you'd basically be telling the Flyman to bring it down. So that's why you don't whistle in the theatre, but I think that's more practical than superstition.
Q) So you cover Eddie, and you made your Eddie debut recently, I believe. Could you tell us a little bit more about the story?
Ben: The story centres around this character, Mrs Johnstone, who is from a very poor working class background in Liverpool. And she can't afford to feed her family, essentially, she's got nothing. She's really struggling and she already has five kids and she falls pregnant with twins. She realises she can't keep the both of them, because she can't afford to. The opportunity arrives whereby Mrs Lyons, who Mrs Johnstone works as a cleaner for, says "oh give me one of the boys, I'll look after them." because she can't have children. So then what happens, is a huge, huge cascade of events that occur over the next 30 years whereby Mickey and Eddie, the twins, keep just being drawn together under circumstances that they would never have kind of thought of. Unfortunately, that then leads to quite a sad ending, hence the name of the show. Not sure what the policy here is on spoilers.
Oviya: Spoil away!
Ben: But yeah, it's a really, really important piece. It highlights the huge difference in the class system, especially in the late 19th century. It draws on themes that are still so relevant today, like class divide, wealth and inequality in this country and opportunity that can arrive from just being born in a different place. The whole point is that you have these two biologically identical people, who end up with very very different lives simply because of who they were brought up by, and where they were brought up. That's the real tragedy of it. The other thing that is important is, everything that happens in Blood Brothers, apart from maybe the more superstitious stuff and maybe the aspect of it genuinely being two twins separated at birth, I think that everything else that happens, it is true. You know, the story of Mickey, which is one of absolute tragedy, the victim of his circumstance from day one, and the reason why he falls into the life he ends up leading, following Sammy into all the crime he ends up committing in the second act, it's because he's a victim of circumstance. Because Eddie is nowhere near that, and there's a line near the end of the show I think sums it up brilliantly, and it's Mickey's line and he just says "ey Mum, why didn't you give me away? I could have been him" and that sums it all up for me really.
Q) You touched upon the heavier themes of the show, what was it about Blood Brothers that drew you in?
Ben: My career, I've spent a lot of time in more happy, clappy, musicals. I've done Dirty Dancing, and Footloose, which were wonderful, big party shows and huge, epic escapist forms of theatre with all the glitz and glamour. But, I think, the first thing I ever really did was a show called Brass in Leeds, and that was a show about the first World War that had huge amounts of poignancy to it. That kind of always stayed with me as something that was a type of theatre that I wanted to make more of. Something that had real heart to it, real meat behind it and a tragic story that hits people between the eyes a bit more and makes people think, makes people question their own perception of the world. That's always been the kind of theatre that I want to set out to make, and I've always known about Blood Brothers, I've never actually seen it, weirdly, before I got the audition through. But I knew what the story was, so when I got the audition through, I just knew I had to try to get this, this is just amazing. Not that I don't think that about every audition. But with this one, I was dead keen. I was like "oh come on, let's just try and get this, it would be lovely".
Q) If you could play any other character in the show, regardless of gender, who would you play and why?
Ben: Okay, yeah, I'm gonna say Linda. Linda is actually my favourite character in the show, I think. Because, from day one, she doesn't really change, and I don't know if you know this, but we start as 7-year-olds, in the piece. By the end, we are in, kind of, our late twenties/thirties, and all the way through from the absolute beginning, Linda defends Mickey. From the first scene until her last scene, she's defending Mickey, trying to look after him. That is such a beautiful character arc, and that thing just links it and glues it together so well. And Gemma, who plays it, is bloody brilliant. She's an amazing actress, and it's a heartbreaking story, a real challenge. I don't know if I could do it justice. I think it's an absolutely beautifully, beautifully written character.
Q) Speaking of unexpected roles, fill us in on what happened when you jumped in on guitar?
Ben: Oh my goodness! Yeah, that was a fun day! So luckily, I was actually in digs living with James, our guitarist, at the time. I'm quite close with James because his partner Sammy was on Footloose with me. So James knows me as a guitarist, because he'd seen me play guitar and things. He was really poorly and unfortunately he had to go to A&E, but we were in Aberdeen and there were no guitarists around that knew the show or anything. So yeah, the MD just sort of called me and went "look, can you do it?" and I said "I'll have a go!". And yeah, so I was sort of whisked into the pits as fast as humanely possible and given the music and given about five hours to try and get it into my fingers.
Q) We've seen you involved in lots of different styles of musicals. In your opinion, what do you think makes a good musical?
Ben: I think for me, with musicals in general terms, the story has to be paramount - and quite often, that's not the case. Without kind of wanting to bash a lot of other shows, there's a few things out there that maybe are designed to sell an existing music catalogue for example, or do something that's a bit more of a spectacle piece. That's great. That's wonderful stuff and it's important that it exists because of course that kind of theatre puts a lot of bums on seats and that's the kind of thing that keeps theatre moving and going forward, and funding projects that perhaps otherwise get off the ground. But for me, the most important kind of theatre is stuff that has really well written stories and text behind it ideally. I'm mainly from an acting background and so that's always been the most important thing for me - this idea that story is first and foremost, before anything else. It's not about how high you can get your leg, it's not about how high you can sing or how well you can sing, the story should always come first. And as for as long that's what the project's team desire from something, then i'll always be interested in it and want to be part of it.
Q) How have you found touring with a production rather than staying in London?
Ben: I adore touring - some people don't, some people find it a bit too much, they like being at home more. I can't get enough of it, I love going to all these different theatres, ticking them off if I get to do a new one, seeing what different audiences are like in different parts of the country, going to visit old venues that I've done before and finding my favourite pub after the show. You know, all that kind of stuff - it's just lovely, I love it.
Ben: I love London, I miss it terribly. It's just - I fell in love with touring when I first did it and I've always got that kind of yearning feeling to get back out there. It's a lot more sociable on tour as well, because often in London, everyone just kind of goes home after the show. But when your on tour, you become a bit more of a bubble, a bit more of a family as a cast and that means you tend to go out a bit more and you socialise - you go for coffee dates in the day and stuff, and yeah it's a bit more of a lifestyle choice on tour.
Q) Do you have any advice for aspiring performers?
Ben: Keep going - just don't stop working hard. It's a really, really hard industry and you just have to accept at some point that you're going to have to work harder than you ever believed you might have to. It's dog eat dog sometimes out there and I think as long as you know that, you know what you're getting into, that hard work doesn't become as much of a chore, I think. It's about really working hard - and don't forget that the most beautiful thing about this industry is the people in it. That's who I do it for anyway.
Blood Brothers is currently performing at Manchester Palace Theatre until 30th November - for more information and tickets, you can follow the link here. For more information on further tour venues and dates, you can follow the link here.
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