"The Herald" newspaper article from 23 April 1993 about Barbara's return to "Blood Brothers".
BARBARA DICKSON RETURNS : CAROLE WODDIS FINDS THE SCOTS SINGER IN RELECTIVE MOOD AS SHE RESUMES A WEST END ROLE.
What makes a performer want to return to the scene of her former glory? For Dunfermline-born singer Barbara Dickson, it is partly to do with wanting to be involved again in one of the great British folk musicals of recent times and perhaps also, partly, to make a point.
Dickson, album and singles chart topper ("Another Suitcase in Another Hall," "I Know Him So Well," with Elaine Paige) has just returned to London's West End to star in Willy Russell's Blood Brothers, repeating the role she created 10 years ago. It also won her in 1984 the Society of West End Theatres' Best Actress in a Musical Award.
After that, she now admits, she fantasised, "the way one does when one's sitting on the toilet or lying in the bath" that it would immediately lead to a flood of offers to join the National Theatre or the RSC.
But it didn't happen. And, she now confesses, she was "terribly upset" when John Byrne's big BBC TV hit Tutti Frutti came and went and she was not even offered a small cameo in it. Had the powers-that-be forgotten that she not only continues to be the owner of one of the most thrilling singing voices in the country but that she is an actress of clout, to boot?
Dickson, still touring, still making albums (the recent one "Don't Think Twice It's Alright" features Bob Dylan songs) and still making regular forays north of the Border, is now happily settled with husband Oliver (whom she met when he was stage manager on the original Blood Brothers) and three small boys of her own in Lincolnshire. But for the next three months, family life has been sacrificed with a reluctance only partly assuaged by the pleasure of being back in harness.
She, of course, has changed. So, too, the production. The script, "the feelings," however, she says, remain the same. Easing her way back in has not been easy but the new company she says have generously "taken me to their bosom."
Ambition satisfied - up to a point. For Dickson, family and the kids come first. So the thought of making herself available for Blood Brothers' Broadway opening this week was not even on the agenda. The contract, too, for her appearances at London's Phoenix Theatre - 14 weeks - is entirely dictated by how much time she feels is the maximum she can be parted from her children, who are six and a half, four and a half and two and a half.
With these priorities, it comes as no surprise when Barbara Dickson admits to identifying quite strongly with her stage character, the maternal and long -suffering Mrs Johnstone - the mother who gives away one of her twin sons to a middle-class mother with tragic consequences.
One of the earliest of Russell's working-class heroines and in many ways, his most interesting, Mrs Johnstone is a Liverpool Catholic, mother of a large, barely manageable family who teeter - and actually fall into - petty crime. Today's papers would probably describe them as "disfunctional."
Dickson however sees Mrs Johnstone as highly respectable, a good Catholic, trapped in the fifties by the dictates of her religion - "poor, but a woman who always does her best." And she goes on to relate a highly revealing little anecdote.
Back in the early days, when it was first being presented in Liverpool, she was doing a radio interview "down-the-line" when the interviewer asked her: "What does it feel like playing a slut?"
The question hit her like a sledgehammer. Recalled now, the insult still hurts. "I felt kicked in the teeth," she says. "It was as if he was talking about my mother or me." As Dickson's own mother came from Liverpool, one can imagine how the comment reverberated.
That was 10 years ago but, a decade on, the play that Russell turned into a musical with Dickson in mind, also has lost none of its power. "Willy wrote it in 1980, before the Thatcher boom. But the overtones of unemployment and bad housing - they're all there in front of you." Equally, Russell's achievement - more poignant now than ever - is to let us see the Johnstones' tragedy as the consequence of something more intractable - Britain's class system - and to do it without a trace of dogma or preaching.
As Dickson says: "Willy writes what real people say." Anybody can recognise that and when Dickson, in crumpled coat and hunched shoulders, sings over the bodies of her boys, "Tell me it's not true," it's not just her individual tragedy but a whole system that stands indicted.
