The plot of Blood Brothers revolves around a lie, a deceit. It is an understandable lie; for those who conspire to fashion it even a necessary, justifiable lie – one small adjustment of fact, a slight re-shaping of truth and all done with the very best of motives. One woman is unable to have her own child, the other woman has so many that she is barely able to raise them all and is, indeed, threatened by the authorities with having some of them taken into care. In such circumstances isn’t it perfectly understandable that between these two women an equitable and humane arrangement is made in which one woman agrees to give up a child and one agrees to raise that child as her own? Well, yes. if, in the case of our two women, Mrs Johnstone and Mrs Lyons, they had conducted their refreshingly modern and sentiment-free piece of social-engineering with complete transparency, allowing all those around them, those likely to be affected by their actions, to know.

Human beings, though, don’t behave in the best of ways, the most sensible of ways, the most rational of ways – thank goodness! For if they did then I and every other dramatist would be out of a job, theatres would not exist, stories would not be made or told. For all that their action and behaviour is understandable, for all that we may sympathise with why they do it, the inescapable fact is that Mrs. Johnstone and Mrs. Lyons conspire to create a lie. And in doing so they fly in the face of the gods that make theatre possible. Truth is concealed, a plot is hatched, a deal is done – the tiny but voracious maggot of deceit can begin to gorge upon these all too mortal lives.

From the author’s programme note in the 2015 Shochiku production of Blood Brothers, Tokyo 2015