Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
✭✭✭✩✩
written and directed by Brendan O’Carroll
Mirvish Productions, Canon Theatre, Toronto
August 19- September 4, 2010
For this reviewer, the opening night of How Now Mrs. Brown Cow! was a bizarre experience. It was rather like stumbling upon a tribal love-in for a domestic goddess I’d never heard of before. Ordinary-looking people all around were doubled up in bouts of cathartic laughter while I stared about puzzled at what had so affected them so much. Yet, there on a worn-looking set was Irish comedian Brendan O’Carroll, looking and acting much like an Irish Archie Bunker in drag, whose every remark or gesture somehow sent paroxysms of laughter through the entire theatre.
O’Carroll created Mrs. Agnes Brown, a Dublin mother of six, for Irish radio in 1990. The series was then adapted into novels, one film and now into a series of plays of which How Now from 2009 is the fifth. The show does not at all feel like a play since it is written and directed exactly like a sitcom. The plot of How Now could be the series’ Christmas special. All of Mrs. Brown’s children will be home for Christmas except Trevor, a priest who works with the poor in Boston. Mrs. Brown’s only daughter Cathy (Jennifer Gibney) has just returned from the US and has seen Trevor. He’s not coming home and neither Cathy nor any of the other Browns can bear to tell their mother. With terrible predictability there's a chorus of "Silent Night" before the end.
The show’s humour seems to derive mostly from the contrast between Mrs. Brown’s humble, homely appearance and her salty language that features at least one F-bomb per sentence. The ten other cast members serve entirely as targets for Mrs. Brown’s wicked wit. She may adore the absent Trevor, but she’s quick enough to tell her friends and other children to “Feck off!” On stage O’Carroll quite enjoys ad-libbing in order to trip up the cast, often causing them to pause until they can repress their laughter long enough to continue. On opening night O’Carroll seemed to single out Gary Hollywood, who plays the straight-acting boyfriend of Mrs. Brown’s flamingly gay son Rory (Rory Cowan). O’Carroll took to fwapping Hollywood’s mic so often with a dish towel the actor could hardly get a word out. Initially it was funny. Eventually it was too much. O’Carroll’s true gift is in physical comedy. The long sequence of jerking about the set after Mrs. Brown accidentally tasers herself sent the crowd into hysterics as did another extended scene when she tries various precipitous means of putting a star on too tall a Christmas tree. If you are partial to this very broad type of comedy, this latest episode of Mrs. Brown may be your cup of tea, but when Mrs. Brown becomes a real TV sitcom this December it will have found its natural home.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-08-20.
Photo: Brendan O’Carroll.
2010-08-20
How Now Mrs. Brown Cow!