OCR GCSE Drama

Plot synopsis Act One The play opens with the Narrator’s ‘story of the Johnstone Twins’. The Narrator invites the audience to ‘judge’ Mrs Johnstone, the working-class mother of the twins. Mrs Johnstone sings about her past and how, by the time she was 25, her husband had abandoned her, leaving her with seven children and pregnant again. Mrs Johnstone works as a cleaner for the Lyons, a middle-class couple who have been unable to have children. When Mrs Lyons learns that Mrs Johnstone is expecting twins, she asks for one. Mrs Johnstone reluctantly agrees when she sees the advantages that a child raised by the Lyons would have. Mrs Lyons makes Mrs Johnstone swear on the Bible to make it a ‘binding agreement’. When the twins are born, Mrs Lyons takes Edward, while Mrs Johnstone keeps Mickey. Mrs Lyons fires Mrs Johnstone from her cleaning job. Mrs Johnstone tries to take Edward back, but Mrs Lyons plays on Mrs Johnstone’s superstitions and tells her that the boys will ‘immediately die’ if they ever learn that they are related. Seven years later, Mickey meets Edward. The boys strike up an immediate friendship, becoming ‘blood brothers’. When Mickey appears at the Lyons house, Mrs Lyons tells Edward he should never go ‘where boys like that live’. Edward swears at Mrs Lyons, who hits him, which she immediately regrets. Stephen Palfreman as Mickey, Natasha Hamilton as Mrs Johnstone and Simon Willmont as Eddie, Phoenix Theatre. OCR GCSE Drama 24 THE SET TEXTS The OCR specification identifies editions of the texts that are used to set questions in the ‘Drama: Performance and response’ (Component 04) examination paper. It is not required that centres use these editions for teaching this component. Here, page numbers refer to the Methuen Modern Classics edition of Blood Brothers , ISBN-13: 978-0-4137-6770-7, one of the editions used by OCR for question setting. 3 bLOOD bROTHERS by Willy Russell