THEATRE REVIEW:
GOOD MOURNING MRS. BROWN
9 MAR/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 3 out of 5

There are days when the sophistication of a steady diet of All in the Family and Coronation Street re-runs, leavened only by episodes of The Simpsons and Kenny vs. Spenny starts to wear a trifle thin -- when one must search beyond the reach of the TV remote for intellectually challenging and socially relevant entertainment.

On days such as those, one can now make their way to the Princess of Wales Theatre, where playwright/director/performer Brendan O'Carroll has set up shop to demonstrate once again to a Canadian audience that, at least in Ireland, the lowest common denominator has more numbers after the decimal point than true pi.

O'Carroll, of course, is the brains and the talent behind the highly successful Brown franchise -- introduced to Toronto audiences last summer, via HOW NOW MRS. BROWN COW! And if you've never heard of it, not to worry, for O'Carroll's success has been based largely in Britain, where he has earned a following tracing the antics of his heroine, the widow Agnes Brown and her family and friends. Born on British radio, O'Carroll's Agnes and her gang have gone on to conquer print, movies, television and stage.

And now, it's our turn. As most successful formulas often are, O'Carroll's is a simple one, built around the antics of Agnes -- a role which he essays in a kind of drag that offers graphic reminder that drag is also a means of finding dead bodies. GOOD MOURNING MRS. BROWN is set in the Dublin home Agnes shares, not only with an ever-shifting panorama of grown children and their partners, but with her late husband's father as well. And when Grandad Brown (Dermot O'Neill), at age 92, starts worrying about what will be said at his funeral, Agnes decides to re-arrange the order of things and give him his funeral before he dies rather than after.

Along the way, she has to sort out a few family matters: A robbery son Dermot (Paddy Houlihan) is planning, even while his wife (Fiona O'Carroll) is about to give birth; a feud between glittering son Rory (Rory Cowan) and his paramour, Dino (Gary Hollywood); a burgeoning romance that's lighting up the life of daughter Cathy (Jennifer Gibney).

O'Carroll also throws in a dipsomaniacal priest, a pair of errant Mormons and other assorted local Dublin fauna, beefing out the script in a more or less ad hoc fashion that allows him to run amok and demonstrate the varied and impressive number of ways the word 'fecking' can be used and abused. (If the Mirvishes were to impose the same kind of quota on this particular f-word as they are rumoured to have done on f-bombs in PRISCILLA QUEEN OF THE DESERT, they'd be left with little more than a comedy sketch out of almost three hours, one suspects.)

It's beer-soaked British music hall with all the elegant bits removed or Dame Edna on the skids if you will. But it is also, Lord help me, sometimes wickedly funny, often in a way that would be embarrassing as hell if you were caught laughing at it. Reviewed here in its final preview, GOOD MOURNING MRS BROWN Brown is a rambling, rambunctious affair that often loses its way and, in the final analysis, even forgets what it set out to do, which is, of course, to allow Grandad to hear what people will have to say about him. But even while it is too fecking long by half, it is still, on occasion, a fecking good time.