FULL OF IRISH SNIDE
The National Post on Mrs. Brown!
by Robert Cushman, The National Post · Monday, Aug. 23, 2010
Pre-show announcements, concerning cellphones and such, are notoriously boring, or, if comically intended, notoriously embarrassing. But now, as we settle in for How Now Mrs. Brown Cow!, there’s an exception. A voice, purportedly female, instructs us on the theatre’s safety regulations and especially on what steps to take in the event of a fire: “F--kin’ big ones.” It’s explosively funny, and so is much of the show that follows. I have a feeling that the more I describe it the less good I will make it sound, but trust me.
The voice, and this isn’t a surprise, is that of Brendan O’Carroll, the entertainment’s star, author and director. He appears as Mrs. Agnes Brown of Dublin, the sexagenarian widowed mother of five or six grown children. (Sorry to be so vague, but the program quotes one figure while the play shows another. Maybe this is another of those jokes about careless Catholics.) The play, as O’Carroll disarmingly tells us at the curtain call, is the fifth in a trilogy; being as prolific as Mrs. Brown herself he promises a sixth, to be entitled I Know a Bandwagon When I See One. Now, we’re not in the land of well-made drama here. The four preceding instalments may conceivably have been closer-knit, but this one plays like a bunch of sitcom episodes placed end to end.
This is not unexpected, as Mrs. Brown started out as a sitcom character on Irish radio, and the plays are spinoffs. It’s old-fashioned sitcom, at that: the kind that revolves around a star comedian given free rein and surrounded by stooges. If it were on TV, it would have a laugh track. Mrs. Brown is a self-absorbed, foul-mouthed matriarch whose favourite word, when she doesn’t feel like using the stronger alternative, is “feck.” (On what system she chooses between them is a mystery.)
She also makes many cups of tea. Her family lives in fear of her, but admit that only she should have kept them together. This dynamic is just about credible, and it keeps the show similarly afloat. Agnes has her own share of neuroses and vulnerabilities; we’re told, in a rare example of someone else getting a good line, that when one of her sons came out of the closet, she retreated into a cupboard. The only one of the clan who doesn’t regard her with awed affection is her white-haired dad (Dermot O’Neill), of whom her treatment verges on elder abuse and who spends most of the play praying that something terrible will happen to her. He almost gets his wish when she has to lean perilously over a banister to hang a star on an inaccessible Christmas tree. It’s the evening’s sustained peak of physical comedy.
Less effective is a scene in which she jerks about the stage after accidentally tasering herself, mercilessly prolonging what should have been a one-off gag. There are several storylines, running in attenuated tandem, including one about a son who may or may not be coming home for Christmas and another about the younger Browns believing, on tenuous evidence, that one of them may have been adopted.
But the evening is not about plot. It’s about a lot of hilarious one-liners, and about O’Carroll’s own effrontery. He steps outrageously out of the frame, while still maintaining a grasp on the character. Where Dame Edna Everage (a richer creation) victimizes the audience, O’Carroll victimizes his fellow actors. He’s always throwing them off with what we must presume to be ad-libs; you’d think they’d be hardened by now, but I’ve never seen so many performers breaking up on a professional stage. He doesn’t stop at verbal interpolations; on the first night the actor playing the gay son’s partner was treated to a succession of slaps, right on his face mic. Trying repeatedly to get his lines out, he was asked, “Are you trying to make a small part bigger?” The audience, myself included, loved it.
I especially enjoyed O’Carroll’s miming of a tape-rewind to give a cast member a second chance at a line that came out wrong the first time. Life and art intersect here, as O’Carroll overpowers his 10 colleagues the way Agnes overpowers her family. Like the old-time actor-managers who used to surround themselves with inferior talents and keep them out of the limelight, he permits a modicum of competition from his wife (Jennifer Gibney, playing his daughter) and none from anyone else.
The pace, on the few occasions when the star is offstage, is funereally slow, since no one else seems able to pick up a cue. The tough talk periodically gives way to syrupy sentimentality, including a very canned-sounding rendition of Silent Night, and there’s a surprise ending that can be seen coming a mile off. If you’re wondering about the title, it’s only explained at the last minute, and when it is you may wish you’d never asked. There are, in short, any number of faults to be found with the show, and none of them matter. O’Carroll keeps pulling the rug from under everyone’s feet, and we all fall happily down.
• How Now Mrs. Brown Cow! runs until Sept. 4. For tickets, call 416-872-1212 or visit mirvish.com.
