THIS is the musical that keeps on giving… blood, sweat and tears. Since 1996, Liverpool impresario Bill Kenwright’s perennial production has played the Grand Opera House no fewer than six times.

The show itself is reason enough to see Willy Russell’s tragicomic Blood Brothers again and again – as your reviewer has done – but who will be filling the shoes of Mrs J is always another selling point. No fewer than four Nolans have played her – a world record logged in that famous Guinness book – and Maureen becomes sister number two to do so in York, after Bernie in 1999.

Maureen has done the rounds as Mrs J, the mother with the fateful family secret, since 2005 and it is a role that means so much to her as one of seven children brought up on a Dublin council estate.

At 59, all those years of Nolan concerts and Blood Brothers performances come to bear in a moving performance of pathos and pain that has plenty of shards of Scouse humour and resilience too.

For Mrs Johnstone, already struggling with too many children on an impoverished Liverpool estate and deserted by her wastrel husband, the discovery that she is pregnant again, this time with twins, is too much for her budget on the never-never.

She can “afford” one more child, not two, she tells Mrs Lyons (Tracy Spencer), the barren wife of a travelling businessman from up the posh hill for whom she cleans. And so a pact is rashly agreed, in which she gives away one of the baby boys to Mrs Lyons, setting in motion the superstition that if twins separated at birth ever discover each other’s existence they will die instantly.

The tragedy of Russell’s 1983 cautionary tale is guided by the rook-like presence of the Narrator, the permanent shadow of guilt and debt collection played hauntingly by Warwick Evans, whose Broadway prowess in this mephistophelean role shines through. More than ever, you notice how Russell’s songs for the Narrator are the harshest, the hardest in a doomed drama full of timeless social truths.

Mrs Johnstone has the best numbers – Marilyn Monroe, Easy Terms and Tell Me It’s Not True – and are all sung from the heart by Maureen Nolan, but Russell’s story also has fantastic roles for the divided brothers, scally Mickey (Sean Jones) and scholarly Eddie (Mark Hutchinson). Comedy gives way to tragedy but what a journey it is from innocent boyhood to ever more contrasting adulthood, as their paths keep crossing despite the class division, under the power of fate.

Jones is in York for a third time after 2008 and 2011 and no wonder he keeps playing a role that he has made his own, so humorous as the cheeky, innocent boy and love-struck, tongue-tied teenager, so forlorn as a broken man dulled by mind-numbing pills. Mark Hutchinson’s Eddie has a wilful, rebellious streak stronger than in previous incarnations but still his charm too.

Olivia Slovan’s lovely Linda and Graham Martin’s series of policeman and teacher cameos catch the eye in Bob Tomson and Bill Kenwright’s coruscating touring show: a show whose angry humanity grows by the year.

Blood Brothers, Grand Opera House, York, until Saturday. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or atgtickets.com/york