One surefire way to elicit sympathy from your cultured friends: tell them you’re going to see Mrs Brown’s Boys at the O2 arena. Was there ever a more polarising show on British television than Brendan O’Carroll’s cross-dressing comedy? It has been the UK’s most popular sitcom by some considerable margin over the past five years, but it is despised by sophisticates, who see in it the revival of all the tired conventions and chauvinisms that alternative comedy, or modernity more generally, were thought to have seen off for good.
I feel agnostic about the phenomenon, partly because I interviewed O’Carroll on the crest of the Mrs Brown wave and he struck me as winningly unpretentious. The few episodes I’ve watched never bore out the wilder allegations levelled against the series, of sexism, homophobia and egregiously hoary jokes. And I rather warmed to the theatricality of the enterprise: Mrs Brown’s Boys never concealed its roots in live theatre, and the qualities associated with that – spontaneity, directness, a sense of communion – are key to its popularity.
Sad to say, then, that my soft spot has taken a bruising after finally catching up with the live show that spawned the TV monster. O’Carroll and his cast (many of whom are members of his extended family) have continued to tour near constantly, even as the sitcom presumably relieved any financial need to do so. This week, Good Mourning Mrs Brown – which shares plot points with the Mammy’s Miracle episode of the TV show – took up residence at the O2, a venue that might have been designed to leach the O’Carroll experience of whatever intimacy and conviviality made it appealing in the first place.
Perhaps as a result, there was far less interaction with – or even acknowledgment of – the crowd than I’d expected. On TV, O’Carroll comes across as an anarchist in twinset and pearls, bulldozing the naturalistic orthodoxies of the genre. On the stage, by contrast, his show feels conservative in the extreme. There are occasional asides to the audience, but mainly it plays out at a substantial remove from the stalls, on a generic sitting-room-and-kitchen set, in a series of scenes changing leadenly from one to another as a story unfolds at geological pace.
What distinguishes the show from the inert family comedies it otherwise resembles is all the ad libbing and corpsing. I’d guess that half of O’Carroll’s lines are improvised, with the express intention of provoking his co-stars into giggles. It certainly works on Rory Cowan as Rory, who spends more time guffawing than acting, out of all proportion to the amusingness of whatever O’Carroll has said. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of horseplay, but into the second hour of Good Mourning Mrs Brown, all the in-jokes started to make me feel like a gooseberry. Or worse, to wonder whether these performers are contractually compelled to feign mirth at O’Carroll’s off-the-cuff gags.
That’s not to deny O’Carroll is an accomplished entertainer. He needs to be: even more so than on the small screen, this is The Brendan O’Carroll Show, and everything orbits around him. Physically and vocally, he’s up for the challenge: his performance is a symphony of funny walks and voices, malapropisms and Les Dawson-alike gurns. He aces the tonal shifts between bluntness and the artless sentimentality that’s integral to the character’s appeal. And if he’s improvising as much as it seems then it’s an impressive feat, which now and then yields choice lines – like the typically gynaecological one about Mrs Brown’s 84-hour labour when giving birth to Rory: “They had to shave me twice.”
But elsewhere, the spirit wilts at O’Carroll’s reliance on sexual innuendo of the cheapest, most desperate variety, not to mention the non-stop (and incongruous) effing and blinding. And the characterisation of Rory and his boyfriend Deano is even camper than on TV: this is homosexuality as mincing exoticism of the type that would make John Inman look like John Wayne.
Where the show really falls down, though, is in its pacing. Its story about faking Grandad’s death so he can find out what people say about him at his funeral gets efficiently told on TV in 29 minutes. Here, it drags its feet across two-and-a-half hours as if the curtain call were a death sentence. The dialogue is sparse at best: there’s lots of dead air. Scenes meander; there’s no forward momentum.
The idea, presumably, is that O’Carroll’s banter and the thermometer-up-Grandad’s-bum set-pieces are diverting enough to excuse the plotlessness. Alas, they’re not. I arrived at the O2 expecting to see Mrs Brown in her natural habitat, released from the constricting shackles of TV convention. But what works on the BBC felt fatally attenuated on stage: by the end, I longed for O’Carroll to slip the shackles on again and disappear back inside the telly.
- Good Mourning Mrs Brown is at the O2 Arena, London, until 9 July
