The Real Mrs. Brown: The Authorised Biography of Brendan O'Carroll

by Beacom, Brian

  ‘And there he was, in that ring, saying to himself, “Still the champ.” And at that moment it dawned on me. I thought, “I’m still the champ.”’

  Steve Collins certainly was. He bombed Eubank from every direction. Eubank was completely disorientated and Collins retained the World Championship.

  ‘We flew back to Dublin the next day. And of course the press were now ringing me non-stop for a reaction to the news about the Festival dropping the play. I said I was disappointed, but added that since I had promised so many of the Dublin public they would see the play, I wasn’t going to let them down. My thinking? “I’m still the champ. I can win here.”’

  What? How? His co-producer had walked off at the ninth tee. The Festival had announced they didn’t want an O’Carroll play. And Brendan reckoned Gerry wasn’t fully committed.

  ‘I told the press the play would go ahead, at a little Fringe Festival, and it would be taking part in Francis Street, at the Tivoli.’

  Tony Byrne freaked at the news. He pleaded with Brendan, saying he couldn’t take the theatre show, that it would ruin relations with the Theatre Festival office. And the Tivoli boss argued the negative publicity would kill off The Course’s chances of success.

  Brendan argued back that he had to take over the Tivoli, and that, rather than garner negative publicity, ‘the neggie would be turned into a possie.’ How? He worked out a plan with Rory. On every newspaper ad for the show he would be printing the tag line: The play that Dublin Festival rejected.

  ‘And I added that I wanted to thank Tony O’Dalaigh for singling me out as the only unique play.’

  The newspapers loved Brendan’s sheer balls and ran riot with the story. Now, he had the most talked-about play ever to hit Dublin. And he talked it up even more. During a series of radio interviews, he turned the news of Festival rejection around, saying he was delighted his play had been turned down. The hopeful playwright stressed that the Festival plays were for the elite – while his plays ‘were for the people who liked a bag of crisps and a laugh.’

  Clever. And the impact of all this? Brendan O’Carroll became the People’s Champion, the voice and soul of the little guy. The battle lines were drawn between working-class Dublin and the middle-class theatre establishment.

  But hassles with the various theatre producers meant that Brendan was on his own mounting the play. Now all he had to do, apart from remortgaging his home to pay the actors’ wages, was to deliver a piece of theatre that was powerful, incisive and hilariously funny.

  After all this fuss, it had to be that good.

  The Secret Millionaire

  Brendan thought his play was funny. And, having read it, so did Gerry. But what did they know about theatre? (Gerry had only ever seen one play in his life.)

  The pair decided to enlist the help of Lee Dunne, who’d written the classic Dublin book Goodbye to the Hill, which had been turned into a play. And so the waiter and the milkman took off to see Dunne’s play performed in the Peacock Theatre, set under the main Dublin bus terminus.

  ‘When I went along to check out the play, I was a bit late arriving. The play had already started and I tried to sneak quietly into the auditorium. But I was captured by the usherette, a blonde lady who didn’t know me from Adam, who showed me in the direction of my seat and said, “Sit the feck there!” And so I did, thinking, “Jaysus, I wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of that one!”’

  Brendan settled down to watch the play but, as the on-stage drama unfolded, his eyes suddenly opened as wide as the stage itself. The ‘usherette’ who had just given him a dressing down had made her way up onto the stage. She was playing the female lead.

  ‘And she was good. Very, very good. And it turned out this was Jennifer Gibney, an actress I’d been tipped off about beforehand. She’d been waiting outside in the foyer because her character had to make her entrance from the back of the hall. And the reason she was so pissed off was she’d been told an important guest – me – was due to arrive, and became fed up with the waiting. So we didn’t get off to a great start.

  ‘But not only was she brilliant, she got a standing ovation at the end. And far bigger applause than any of the other actors.’

  Though possibly it helped that Jenny, a statuesque blonde and also from Finglas, had been working part-time in a bank and a group of around twenty colleagues had come along to support her. Hence the huge cheer.

  Yet, she was still very good. And Brendan had found the actress to play the downtrodden housewife, Emily Beauchamp.

  He didn’t look too far in recruiting the rest of the team. Brendan played Joe, the PMA boss (who, in fact, had few comedic lines; everyone else got the chance to shine). Gerry played Will Benson, the cynical, recovering alcoholic, and Brendan Keely, whom they had met during the Rathmines stint, was perfect for the fey, out-of-work actor, even though he’d never acted before.

  Brendan Morrisey, Paul Lee (an established actor from the prestigious Abbey Theatre) and Ciaron McMahon completed the cast.

  Brendan and Gerry, once again, tried to recruit from people they knew. The wardrobe mistress, Mary Cullen, had an alterations shop in Finglas, and had never worked in a theatre in her life. Brendan reckoned she’d soon learn what was required. And she did. The family was growing.

  Did it matter that Brendan and Gerry had never acted on stage before? Not to them. The rascals from Finglas believed they could do anything, until proven otherwise.

  However, rehearsals, it’s fair to say, were not what the experienced actors in the cast had been used to. Jenny Gibney certainly wasn’t overly impressed by the troupe. She thought Gerry a loud-mouthed irritant, a feeling no doubt fostered by the first thing he said to her. ‘Let’s rehearse the sex scene,’ he joked. And the line might have gone down better had the play in fact contained a sex scene.

  She wasn’t overly impressed by Brendan Keely’s raw approach to the craft, nor was she pleased by the cavalier approach the producers seemed to have towards theatre production.

  Jenny was used to turning up for rehearsals at 10 a.m., and starting exactly on time. On this first day, Brendan and Gerry and co. ‘were doing a lot of standing around, huddled together chatting and drinking coffee and looking like the Dublin branch of the Mafia. And it was now twelve o’clock.’

  Jenny didn’t immediately warm to the producer and the star of the show either. She thought Brendan was ‘a little Hitler’.

  ‘I thought Jenny was a mouthy gobshite,’ says Brendan. ‘Although she did the Irish Times crossword, smoked Consulates and drank coffee, which reminded me of my mother.’

  But it was all very well employing friends, soon-to-be-friends and mouthy gobshites with Maureen O’Carroll traits. They all had to be paid during rehearsals, even when there was no income coming in. Brendan and Gerry were still gigging at night and making enough to pay their own bills, but this additional cost of eight wages, building a set, renting rehearsal space, wardrobe and stage crew soon gobbled up any spare cash.

  By the second week of rehearsals, all the cash had gone. The People’s Champion, the lover of crisps, hadn’t the price of a packet of Golden Wonders to his name.

  The waiter and the milkman might have had the self-belief of a legion of men on Prozac, but that didn’t mean they could go anywhere near a cash machine.

  But out of the blue, Brendan got a call from business magnate and Celtic FC majority share-owner, Dermot Desmond. He had read the story about the Theatre Festival pulling out.

  ‘Brendan? It’s Dermot Desmond. Can you come up and see me?’

  Brendan set off immediately to Desmond’s office. The multi-millionaire was seated at his desk.

  ‘Tell me, Brendan, is the story about the play being rejected true?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Well, Tony O’Dalaigh said it lacks artistic merit.’

  ‘Do you think it’s a good play?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Are you going to go ahead with
it?’

  ‘I definitely am.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Dermot Desmond pushed an envelope in front of the hopeful theatre producer and said, ‘Okay. You have to go now.’

  Brendan left the office, opened the envelope, and inside was a cheque for £5,000.

  It was enough to pay the wages through rehearsals. But Brendan, now just past his fortieth birthday, then came up with a strategy that had never been attempted by any theatre producer in the world.

  He told his cast they weren’t going to rehearse the play; they were going on a course, the very same PMA course that Brendan had embarked upon five years ago. The grinning producer announced he’d hired one of the PMA instructors to put them through their paces.

  ‘They were a bit taken aback when I told them this, but the idea was so they could really understand the play. And I also wanted to have them psyched up for the whole experience of performing it. At first they thought the idea madness, but then they came round to it, and viewed it as a learning experience – and a bit of fun.’

  At the end of the session, Brendan was taken to one side by the PMA leader and given some insight into his cast’s performances.

  ‘He said, “There’s one girl in the cast who, if this play doesn’t work out, has a real future in sales. She’s a sales star in the making.” The girl was Jenny.’

  The play was due to open on Tuesday 9 October. On the Friday beforehand, Brendan sat the cast down and delivered his own inspirational speech.

  ‘I told the cast what the play meant to me. I told them about my first theatre experience at the age of nine, what that had meant to me. I told them what I felt they had to give this audience. They were with me. I had them. They were psyched.’

  Great. They were all set to put on a fantastic show. Surely nothing else could go wrong?

  ‘Just then my director announced he was leaving. The lighting designer pulled out. Then my set designer walked out as well.’

  And so the writer/star was pushed to make his acting, writing and directorial debut, all at the one time.

  ‘I said to the cast, “Look, even if this is the greatest theatre disaster ever, this is the most high-profile play in Irish history. And no matter what happens, you are going to be part of it. So let’s do it well.”’

  The production hadn’t even sold enough tickets to fill the front row of the 600-seat theatre. Anyone else would have read the signs – and wept.

  ‘I thought we were knackered. I thought it was all over. But we had to go on.’

  And then a miracle happened. A moment worthy of any Hollywood film finale occurred that opening Tuesday night in 1995.

  ‘I set off for the theatre around six, and headed into Francis Street,’ says Brendan, his voice emotional as he rewinds. ‘And you couldn’t get into the street. The queue outside the theatre was running all the way down the road.’

  Dublin had turned out in droves to see his play. Those who had seen Brendan perform stand-up wanted to see what the fuss was all about. And those who’d read in the papers that he was something of an outcast from the theatre establishment warmed to the council house rebel with the primary school education.

  ‘I had misread my audience. They weren’t all regular theatre-goers. They were not people to buy tickets way in advance. They go along on the night.’

  And so the cast performed the play to a sell-out crowd. And when the final line was delivered and the lights went down, the biggest cheer Brendan had ever heard in his life went up. They took curtain call after curtain call. And when the cast walked off and stood in the wings, not believing their ears, the applause still boomed like thunder.

  The Course went on to run for an amazing sixteen weeks. Word of mouth was incredible. The Irish Independent said, ‘The Course is a few scenes short of a play’, but, on the whole, newspaper critics loved it.

  And for the two weeks during the Festival, The Course took more at the box office than all the other Festival plays put together. The fact that the play was about Positive Mental Attitude gave the tale an added piquancy.

  ‘The rehearsals for the play carried me through it,’ Brendan admits. ‘I needed the PMA to get me over the hurdles.’

  One of the smaller hurdles Brendan had to leap over was Brendan Keely. One night at ten to eight, Keely still hadn’t shown up and Brendan called him, only to discover his actor was 20 miles away. What to do? There wasn’t an understudy so they waited until they knew he was 20 minutes away and began the show, hoping he’d arrive by the time his character made an entrance.

  After the show, an outraged Brendan revealed he was going to kill his namesake.

  ‘You’re a little bollix and I should sack you.’

  ‘And if I were you I would. I am a little bollix indeed.’

  And that admission totally disarmed the boss.

  ‘What can you do with someone like that?’ he says, rhetorically.

  The likeable and entirely honest little bollix that is Keely would later go on to join the priesthood.

  Dublin, meanwhile, couldn’t get enough of The Course. After the play’s eight-week run at the Tivoli, it moved on to the Gaiety Theatre (with almost triple capacity) and sold out for another eight weeks.

  No other play had ever run in Dublin for four months. It was the biggest-selling comedy play ever and it would hold that record until five years later, when beaten by a new theatre show called Mrs Brown’s Last Wedding. (And that record would be beaten by Mrs Brown Rides Again.)

  The People’s Champion had been crowned. He had created unashamedly populist theatre that was funny. And his subjects loved the fact that he was anti-establishment.

  Brendan was a rebel and a fighter. He didn’t negotiate. He hired non-actors. He didn’t follow the rules. Not consciously, it was just his way. But he couldn’t have cared less.

  The financier Dermot Desmond never came to the opening of the play. And he never spoke to Brendan after that time in his office. But there’s no doubt he would have smiled when he read of the massive success. He would have agreed that The Course being the best play in the land, it simply had to go on tour.

  Going West

  The Course toured most of Ireland’s major theatres. The show ran well, and a tour of Scotland, England and Toronto was lined up. In the spring of 1996, just before The Course set off to go to Glasgow’s Mitchell Theatre, Brendan was rummaging around in his office at home and found a CV from an actor, Michael Pyatt, which had been sent to him the year before.

  ‘It was a really nice letter. It was very warm and humorous and it was from a bloke who said he lived in Stafford but his mother was Irish. The mother had seen me talking on The Late, Late Show about how I planned to write a play. And she had persuaded Michael to send me his CV and ask to be kept in mind if/when the play came to go into production.

  ‘At the time I had already fixed up a cast, but I sent him a letter saying I’d keep him on file if ever anyone dropped out.

  ‘Anyway, there it was and I rang up this bloke, and when he came on the line he could hardly speak. He told me the reason later. It turned out that at the moment I’d called, he’d been tidying out his desk, found my letter and had just crumpled it up and thrown it in the bin.

  ‘During our conversation, he fished it back out and was smoothing it out as we spoke.’

  It was one of those magical moments.

  ‘And I said, “Michael, what are you working on at the moment?”

  ‘“Well, I’m driving a van actually. I’ve been working in kids’ educational theatre but the contract has just come to an end.”

  ‘“Well, how would you like to come up to Glasgow?”

  ‘“It sounds great. But could you give me twenty-four hours to think it over?”

  ‘“I can give you twenty-two. Because that’s when we’re leaving.”

  ‘“Okay, I’ll call you before then.”

  ‘And he did. Eleven hours later he rang. “I’d love to come up for the audition, Brendan.”

  ‘�
��You don’t have to audition, Michael. If you want the part it’s yours.”’

  Incredible. Hired on the strength of a letter and phone call. But Brendan had liked Pikey, from the tone of the letter and the conversation. (Pikey would become a Mrs Brown regular on stage and on TV, playing Cathy’s boyfriend Professor Clowne.)

  In Glasgow, the cast assembled on the Monday for a week of rehearsals and Brendan replaced Paul Lee with Michael Pyatt.

  In 1996, the show toured Ireland and then moved on to play in London, Manchester and Birmingham. Sales weren’t great, but it was a new play. However, when the cast arrived in Liverpool, it was now the height of summer and ‘gorgeous weather’. And the last place anyone would wish to be in was a theatre.

  As a result, box office for an unknown Irish play full of unknown actors was dreadful. One night there were hardly enough people in the hall to fill the front row of the Royal Court.

  Brendan was determined that it wouldn’t affect the show, saying to his cast, ‘Look, there may not be many people out there, but I want you to perform this play to the very best of your ability for every last one of them. They’ve paid their money, so they deserve to have a great night. And that’s what we’ll give them.’

  But the box office was so bad that Brendan and Gerry couldn’t afford to pay the wages. It was Jenny who offered to bail them out. She borrowed £8,000 from the bank and the travelling band of actors remained in business.

  That didn’t stop Brendan and his team from setting off for Toronto in August in a bid to conquer North America. Sure, the UK trip hadn’t gone too well. But they believed Canadian audiences would find The Course funny, given the Irish contingent who’d emigrated to North America.

  And it all looked hugely promising. The troupe arrived at Toronto’s Pearson Airport, at the start of the Toronto Film Festival. Ordinarily, that would make no difference, but this year Roddy Doyle’s The Van was the major film being premiered.