Brendan O'Carroll as Mrs. Brown
Mrs. Brown has been welcomed back to Toronto with open arms by her fans, but will no doubt be greeted again with crossed arms by critics. My hands remained tucked under my armpits for most of Good Mourning, Mrs. Brown, anyway.
Irish comedian Brendan O'Carroll's Dublin mam-in-drag routine has definitely conquered a certain segment of the population. Mrs. Brown has made her merry way through radio series, books, a succession of stage plays and is now the star of a sitcom that was a hit for Ireland's RTE channel and is currently attracting strong ratings on BBC in Britain.
O'Carroll's secret to success is not particularly complicated: Dressed up in a dress and wig reminiscent of a pre-makeover Susan Boyle, he attacks members of Mrs. Brown's feckless extended family with "feck"-filled insults, frequently followed by a sozzled Woody Woodpecker laugh.
Good Mourning, Mrs. Brown features a cast of 12 and a plot of sorts involving a faked funeral and the relationship problems of various Brown children, but it's essentially a series of sketches with the other actors functioning merely as human props for O'Carroll to snap tea-towels against.
I'm hardly the only critic not having it. The Mirror described her television incarnation, Mrs. Brown's Boys, as "a dated throwback to a bygone age," while the Irish Independent shuddered that it was "TV that makes you vaguely embarrassed to be Irish."
That the Mrs. Brown humour is old-fashioned - a recurring complaint - is only true to a point. While O'Carroll's character is most often compared to the working-class mums played by British comedian Les Dawson in the 1960s and 1970s, she does have her stage contemporaries - notably the no-nonsense African-American matriarch Madea that has made Tyler Perry millions on the so-called "chitlin' circuit." The rebuttal would be that O'Carroll's comedy is "classic."
And yet, O'Carroll gets away with being much more profane and crass than he would have in the past. It was only in 1965 that theatre critic Kenneth Tynan caused outrage by being the first to, in today's parlance, "drop the F-bomb" on the BBC. Last month's British premiere of Mrs. Brown's Boys, however, according to calculations of the Daily Express, featured the popular curse word or one of its variants 34 times in 30 minutes, a new record for the British public broadcaster.
O'Carroll's unenlightened approach to his gay characters, however, is definitely "vintage," only in a bad way. It doesn't really rankle that the reactionary Mrs. Brown calls her son Rory's homosexuality an "illness," but it is profoundly annoying that the ridiculously costumed actor Rory Cowan portrays it as one - one that apparently leads to colour-blindness, a non-stop flapping of the arms and the inability to get through more than a couple of lines without giggling.
That lack of professionalism is actually a calculated effect, with O'Carroll constantly trying to get his co-stars to break character by throwing ad-libs at them or smacking them on the face. I sincerely doubt that this scenery-chomping dictator would countenance any of his co-stars turning the tables on him, however. Only the cast members who are related to him are permitted to play anything approaching a well-rounded character: O'Carroll's wife Jennifer Gibney is allowed to elicit sympathy as the exasperated daughter Cathy, while his son Danny gets to show off circus tricks as local ne'er-do-well Buster Brady.
It's the sloppiness surrounding O'Carroll's Mrs. Brown, an often funny routine no doubt designed to make him shine more brightly, that irritates the most. The scenes go on far too long, and there's no shape to the story. A joke about seeing the 2000 movie Gladiator "last year" at the local cinema is followed with a gag about Twitter. Even Mrs. Brown's fans deserve a better crafted work than this.
Good Mourning, Mrs. Brown
- Written, directed by and starring Brendan O'Carroll
- At the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto
Good Mourning, Mrs. Brown runs until March 19.