The Real Mrs. Brown: The Authorised Biography of Brendan O'Carroll (27 page)

But there was a slight catch. Brendan didn’t want any mirrors in the room. He didn’t want to see the transformation take place. He wanted to see the complete, finished result.

‘I was made up and I began talking as Mrs Browne, using the voice saying, “Mary had a little lamb . . .” and as I talked I walked towards a mirror, looked up and said [Mrs Browne voice], “Hello!” – and she was standing there in front of me. I thought, “This is going to work.”’

Writing the play had given Brendan confidence. He sensed he had a winner. The plan was to open
Mrs Browne’s Last Wedding
in Cork, at the Everyman Palace Theatre, for five nights, before moving on to Dublin.

Brendan didn’t want to open the production in Dublin: that would be too risky with an untested play. Far better to open out of town, take the opportunity to iron out wrinkles, see if the cast all gelled, and make the mistakes that wouldn’t matter too much.

That said, he desperately wanted the Cork run to work. He knew that good reviews would reach his home town.

The next step was to call Gerry in and ask him to arrange dates in Liverpool, Glasgow and Manchester. Brendan knew he had to tour. He
knew
he could make money.

But then everything seemed to be going mad. Things weren’t helped by the reception the cast received when they arrived in Cork, on the day before the Monday show.

Brendan was met by the front-of-house manager, who announced that the sales were ‘disappointing’, which is a trade euphemism for ‘You may as well open an artery and let the blood flow into the stalls.’

Brendan was knocked by the news, but he took an upbeat line, saying, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ He tried to console himself with the fact that this was just a warm-up for Dublin. And he desperately hoped the week in Cork would at least pay for itself.

There was another worrying sign, however. Good first-night reviews are vital to the success of a play, but on opening night, the reviewer for the
Cork Examiner
was ill, so the paper sent their opera/culture critic.

‘The house manager was shitting himself when she arrived.’

Brendan was truly nervous. He was dragging his old debts around and was also risking having to pay back Denis Desmond’s investment, should the play go belly-up. The last thing he wanted was for the first review to be negative.

Bizarrely, given how skint Ireland’s two Likely Lads were, Brendan and Gerry decided to donate the profits from their world premiere show to the Chernobyl Children’s Project. And it wasn’t uncharacteristic of the pair. They gave money over to charity projects on a regular basis.

The
Cork Examiner
described how ‘the partners and life-long friends would be making many young children happy.’

But would they put a smile on the faces of grown-ups that week in February? The production was already facing a minor meltdown.

‘We didn’t even have a dress rehearsal, and we were so far behind with the technical rehearsals when the lights went up for that very first scene, with me in Agnes Browne’s living room, the cast saw me as her for the very first time. Jenny says from that moment, she never saw me as Brendan O’Carroll on stage, she just saw The Mammy.

‘I also wanted Agnes to be totally believable to the cast. This wasn’t as it had been in rehearsals, with the cast speaking lines to a bloke with a moustache. They had to be speaking to their mother.’

And they were. Brendan’s Agnes was bang on the money. She looked like Maureen O’Carroll and she had many of her mannerisms. On top of that, Brendan had unconsciously added little bits of Gerry Browne’s mammy, too, and of Dolly Dowdall and Cecil Sheridan’s stage dames. This wasn’t a woman up there on stage, although she had the walk, the demeanour, the presence. But it wasn’t a caricature either. It was as close as you can get without removing the Adam’s Apple and the usual male instrumentation. The Monday night audience bought into Brendan’s performance completely. His stage version of the character he’d created on radio was hilarious, and the audience loved her from the moment she shuffled onto the stage.

They also loved her friend, Winnie. What the audience didn’t realise was that Winnie was far from the doddery old lady she appeared on stage; that Eilish O’Carroll had done a fantastic job of getting into character. She had achieved it by creating a picture in her head of who Winnie should look like, based on her mammy’s friend, Nancy Pimley. Nancy was a bright Winnie, but always in awe of Maureen O’Carroll.

And all the other characters gelled. A standing ovation followed the curtain drop and, after the show, the cast celebrated like it was Christmas and New Year combined.

All except Brendan. He had other matters on his mind.

‘At this time, Fiona was sixteen and she was working on the ships to Le Havre as a receptionist. She called me in tears. She was being worked for twenty-two-hour stretches and had had enough. So I said to leave the ferry when she came back and I’d pick her up in Wexford. And I set off at four a.m. to collect her and took her for breakfast and to cheer her up, and she was grand.’

The newspaper reviews were also grand.

‘The
Cork Examiner
review began, “I was met at the door of the theatre before the show started by the front-of-house manager, Vincent. He obviously wasn’t expecting to see me. He said, ‘Welcome to the show, but let me just forewarn you. This is not Shakespeare.’ But you know, I’ve seen this play and I have to say this is Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote for the Penny Circle. Shakespeare wrote for people who have dreary lives, who get to come and watch their lives being lit up on stage and have the opportunity to laugh at themselves. This is what Shakespeare did. And this is indeed Shakespeare.”’

The review helped box-office sales, but word-of-mouth was the major factor. By lunchtime on Tuesday, that night’s play was sold out. And the rest of the week quickly sold out too. Brendan’s wings began to appear again.

‘The theatre manager asked us if we would extend the show to Saturday and Sunday. And we didn’t want to let him down – he’d shown faith in us – so we agreed. And we weren’t opening until the Tuesday in the Gaiety, so it was all feasible.’

But there was a problem to overcome. The actress who played Betty said she didn’t want to perform at the weekend. She said she wasn’t signed up for the weekend, and she’d made plans to go out with her boyfriend.

‘I said, “Look love, this is the acting business. You have to work when the opportunity is there. And, even more importantly, if this play does well, and I think it might, we could extend our run. And we’re going to Dublin for three weeks. Who knows what will happen?” But she stuck her heels in. “I’m not doing Saturday and Sunday,” she argued. And I said, “Okay, no problem.”’

Brendan came up with a ready solution. Once again he decided to pick a wild flower from the garden. In this case it was Sheila Carty, who ran the theatre bar. Brendan reckoned she had a great personality, which came across after the shows when she would get up and sing with the jazz band.

So why not put her up there on stage?

‘I said to her that night, “Sheila, I want you to watch the play tonight really closely, in particular the part of Betty. Because, on Saturday, I want you to play Betty.”

‘She looked shocked and said, “Oh, I couldn’t, Brendan. I’ve never acted.”’

But she could. And she did. Sheila would go on to tour with the cast as Betty for the next two years.

The next stop was Dublin. And the play took the town by storm, going on to run at the Gaiety for an incredible 15 weeks, beating the audience records for
The Course
.

Yet, Brendan says he was a little more subdued by success this time around.

‘I didn’t ever go back to the thinking that I owned the sun,’ he says. ‘I came off stage feeling thankful that we’d gotten away with it, that we’d had a wonderful day. And that’s the way I’ve felt ever since.’

He adds, ‘I’m always saying to Jenny, “Hey, it’s the end of the day and we’re still alive.”’

Now, all Brendan and Gerry had to do was take Mrs Browne on tour. But they were both entirely aware that having a hit play in your home town doesn’t guarantee success anywhere else.

However, Brendan believed he had to take the gamble.

Agnes Belongs to Glasgow

THE IRISH success of
Last Wedding
wasn’t the only highlight of 1999. Brendan had a small part in the hit movie
Angela’s Ashes
, playing an undertaker, although he admits he found Frank McCourt’s book about his Limerick childhood a little depressing and didn’t make it past Chapter Ten. (
Angela’s Ashes
also offered work to a hopeful young actor, Danny O’Carroll. Now 16, Danny would eventually join his dad on stage playing the Buster Brady character.)

Director Alan Parker and star Bobby Carlyle were great to work with. But Brendan found filming
Angela’s Ashes
traumatic.

‘I accepted the part immediately. But it was only when I looked at it more closely did I realise that I would be burying children in their little white coffins. Suddenly the colour drained out of my face. All I could think about was little Brendan.

‘After the funeral scene, Bobby asked me to come out for a pint with him and the rest of the cast, but I turned him down. After filming a scene like that, I just wanted to go home. It was so emotionally draining I couldn’t bear to go out and enjoy myself, even though in retrospect it would have probably been a great way to unwind.’

Brendan’s next focus was on the upcoming
Last Wedding
tour. This time he was more than aware of the risks of taking out a huge production, with so many hotel rooms to pay for and mouths to feed. He knew he had a hit play. But would the UK give Mrs Brown the time of day?

Gerry Browne was dispatched to Glasgow, a hugely important city in that it was home to the Pavilion Theatre, a former variety hall and a 1,600-seater with a distinctly working-class audience. On the face of it, the Pavilion was the perfect home for Agnes and co. And so Gerry arrived at the theatre door with a plastic bag in his hand and a look of desperation on his face. But, in the Superquinn bag, he felt, lay hope. What it contained was a dog-eared copy of
Mrs Brown’s Last Wedding
.

But what would the no-nonsense, short-fused Pavilion manager Iain Gordon think of this Irish invasion? When the phone rang in his upstairs office to herald the arrival of a Mr Browne, Iain Gordon studied his closed-circuit camera to check out the man in the foyer. And the sight of a tall, slightly scruffy, slightly desperate-looking man clutching a supermarket plastic bag didn’t impress him.

Upstairs in the office, Iain Gordon told Gerry Browne straight off he’d never heard of him or Brendan O’Carroll. And why should he even think about staging an unknown Irish play in his town?

But he liked Gerry Browne’s upbeat attitude, and loved the fact he seemed a trier, and said he would read the script. He did – but the result wasn’t good. The theatre boss reckoned the play was ‘as funny as piles’.

Gerry persisted, arguing how well it had gone down in Dublin. Iain Gordon listened, but didn’t agree. It was only when he brought in an actor friend to read it aloud in an Irish accent that it seemed to make sense.

The Glasgow theatre boss agreed to take the chance on the play, splitting the box-office receipts. But there was a problem. The Pavilion manager reckoned a new play needed £25,000 spent on advertising, which Brendan and Gerry would pay half of. But Brendan and Gerry, still with massive debts, had no money. Zero. Gerry was in fact sticking the travel costs on his Visa card.

Gerry asked Iain Gordon for an advance. It was highly unusual, but the gruff Glasgow theatre boss put his hand in his pocket and gave the Irishman the money for the hotels.

The Pavilion boss also paid for the radio and newspaper advertising. But the strategy didn’t work. Ticket sales were disastrous.

And when the Irish hopefuls turned up for technical rehearsals the day before the show opened in June 1999, the Pavilion boss was dismayed by what he saw. He reckons the set was the cheapest, tackiest, ever. And Brendan and co. ‘looked to be a team of losers’.

To make matters worse, ticket sales for the week were dreadful. June is not a great month for theatres anywhere, but this was disastrous. A few hundred tickets had been sold for the opening night, but that was in a two-for-one deal.

The entire ticket sales for the week were just £5,000 (an average production would take in from £50,000 to £80,000 for the week) and the Pavilion boss was all set to pull the production.

‘I wouldn’t have blamed him,’ says Brendan. ‘The advertising hadn’t worked. No one had ever heard of the Mrs Brown character. Why would they come?’

However, Brendan made an appeal to Iain Gordon.

‘I walked into his office and said, ‘If you stick with this play, I will make you a million quid.’ Now, the truth is, I didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. But it turned out to be true.’

The theatre boss announced to Brendan and Gerry that he’d run the show until the end of the week, and then it would be pulled. He was cutting his losses.

On opening night, however, the theatre boss was amazed by what he witnessed on stage. It didn’t matter if the set looked a bit ramshackle, the audience simply loved
Last Wedding.
And Iain Gordon, a man who guards his emotions more carefully than the box-office takings, says he laughed louder than he’d ever laughed in his life. By the end of the week, a minor miracle on Renfield Street was taking place. Those who’d seen the first few nights had gone home and told their friends. The box-office phone sparkled like the generators Brendan, John Breen and Jimmy Matthews had once slept near. And the theatre boss kept the doors open for a second week. On one day alone, the Pavilion till took £20,000.