Sean Jones talks to Steve Pratt about his long association with Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers

SEAN Jones jokes that “the judge says if I behave myself I’ll be out in five years”. He’s being funny, talking about his long-serving time spent not behind bars, but on stage in Willy Russell’s hit musical Blood Brothers, both in the West End and on tour on and off since 1999.

This “sentence” isn’t hard labour because he enjoys being in the award-winning show so much. The production plays Darlington Civic Theatre again next week, a venue where he’s appeared as Mickey six, maybe seven times. “It’s possibly one of my favourite theatres and I love Darlington as a town,” says Jones, who comes from Denbigh in North Wales.

He joined the show in the West End – where it ran for 24 years – as an understudy, a role he grabbed with both hands with the idea of doing his apprenticeship and playing the role a number of times because there’s more chance of understudies going on in London than on tour.

In the Liverpool-set musical, Mickey is one of the twin boys separated at birth and raised in very different circumstances, only to be reunited by a twist of fate. Maureen Nolan, the fourth Nolan sister to play the central role of Mrs Johnstone, heads the cast.

Jones left the tour to play Mickey in the final months of the London run, alongside many of the original cast. He’s worked with many different actors in the show over the years. In Glasgow the other week, Wet Wet Wet’s Marti Pellow returned as the Narrator while the role of Eddie, Mickey’s twin, is currently being played by an actor 20 years younger than Jones. “Theatre is a great leveller. It doesn’t matter what your background or age, everyone is treated the same,” he says.

He remembers the first piece of theatre he saw – a staging of Dracula at his local town hall. “I was bit of a strange boy. I’d sneak down and watch horror films when my parents had gone to bed and buy horror comics. I begged my mum to let me go and see Dracula on stage. I was petrified. They had a bat on a wire flying over audience.

“I bumped into the actors a few days later in a different town in an amusement arcade and went up to one of them and said, ‘You were in Dracula’. I was only six.”

A career in acting seemed the natural course for him. “I was a natural born extrovert really. I was a clown at school. I loved attention and finding ways of getting that attention,” he explains.

“I never got picked for anything because I was a troublemaker, but when I was ten or 11 I was cast in a school play. A light bulb lit up and I thought, ‘That’s what I am’. It made sense and I wanted to be an actor. My parents tried their best to put me off, but I just knew what I wanted to do. If you want to be an actor you will be an actor whether people want you to or not. If it’s what you love doing it doesn’t feel so hard.”

Although Blood Brothers has occupied much of his time, he doesn’t see himself as a musical theatre performer, and singing isn’t his greatest joy. “I get really nervous. Then I sing and it’s okay. There are some really beautiful singers in the company, yet I have to sing two songs on my own. I’m not a singer and have a career as a singer, so I just have to act it,” he says.

“This is what I try to explain to young actors, that if you go into a show that’s up and running a lot of things are set in stone, but you can also make it look like your own work. You still have to make sure it feels fresh and that’s the job of an actor.”

He doesn’t agree that the background story of Blood Brothers is dated because the politics and idea of someone being given a bad hand because they’re brought up in the wrong area still rings as true today as it did many years ago, when the show began. He knows that the show works with young audiences because he is involved in schools with students reading it for GCSE drama studies. “It gives them an added dimension to have an actor there, rather than sitting there studying a piece of literature. The show really engages with people,” he says.

“Some people say it’s been around a long time and has dated, but you think differently when you see a kid aged 14 or 15 going to see it. Most of the time they’ve never been to the theatre in their life, but they get involved and come out saying it’s brilliant. It’s great to get them interested in something that’s not Xbox or a cinema trip.”

His own acting education continued after studying at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, by winning funding to study and work in Japan for several months. He took Japanese lessons before going to work with Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa in Tokyo. Twelve months later he was back there in a Japanese tour of Macbeth. Being an English actor who could speak Japanese had its advantages.

The Monday after the Blood Brothers tour ends he starts rehearsals for pantomime, something he’s done for the past three years in his home area in Wales. He’s spending more time in that country now that he’s moved back with his wife and daughter. “Panto is great for me. I can go round and round the stage, messing about and ad-libbing. There’s so much freedom,” he says.

Blood Brothers: Darlington Civic Theatre, Monday to Saturday. Box Office: 01325-486555 and darlingtoncivic.co.uk