THE COURSE toured most of Ireland’s major theatres. The show ran well, and a tour of Scotland, England and Toronto was lined up. In the spring of 1996, just before The Course set off to go to Glasgow’s Mitchell Theatre, Brendan was rummaging around in his office at home and found a CV from an actor, Michael Pyatt, which had been sent to him the year before.
‘It was a really nice letter. It was very warm and humorous and it was from a bloke who said he lived in Stafford but his mother was Irish. The mother had seen me talking on The Late, Late Show about how I planned to write a play. And she had persuaded Michael to send me his CV and ask to be kept in mind if/when the play came to go into production.
‘At the time I had already fixed up a cast, but I sent him a letter saying I’d keep him on file if ever anyone dropped out.
‘Anyway, there it was and I rang up this bloke, and when he came on the line he could hardly speak. He told me the reason later. It turned out that at the moment I’d called, he’d been tidying out his desk, found my letter and had just crumpled it up and thrown it in the bin.
‘During our conversation, he fished it back out and was smoothing it out as we spoke.’
It was one of those magical moments.
‘And I said, “Michael, what are you working on at the moment?”
‘“Well, I’m driving a van actually. I’ve been working in kids’ educational theatre but the contract has just come to an end.”
‘“Well, how would you like to come up to Glasgow?”
‘“It sounds great. But could you give me twenty-four hours to think it over?”
‘“I can give you twenty-two. Because that’s when we’re leaving.”
‘“Okay, I’ll call you before then.”
‘And he did. Eleven hours later he rang. “I’d love to come up for the audition, Brendan.”
‘“You don’t have to audition, Michael. If you want the part it’s yours.”’
Incredible. Hired on the strength of a letter and phone call. But Brendan had liked Pikey, from the tone of the letter and the conversation. (Pikey would become a Mrs Brown regular on stage and on TV, playing Cathy’s boyfriend Professor Clowne.)
In Glasgow, the cast assembled on the Monday for a week of rehearsals and Brendan replaced Paul Lee with Michael Pyatt.
In 1996, the show toured Ireland and then moved on to play in London, Manchester and Birmingham. Sales weren’t great, but it was a new play. However, when the cast arrived in Liverpool, it was now the height of summer and ‘gorgeous weather’. And the last place anyone would wish to be in was a theatre.
As a result, box office for an unknown Irish play full of unknown actors was dreadful. One night there were hardly enough people in the hall to fill the front row of the Royal Court.
Brendan was determined that it wouldn’t affect the show, saying to his cast, ‘Look, there may not be many people out there, but I want you to perform this play to the very best of your ability for every last one of them. They’ve paid their money, so they deserve to have a great night. And that’s what we’ll give them.’
But the box office was so bad that Brendan and Gerry couldn’t afford to pay the wages. It was Jenny who offered to bail them out. She borrowed £8,000 from the bank and the travelling band of actors remained in business.
That didn’t stop Brendan and his team from setting off for Toronto in August in a bid to conquer North America. Sure, the UK trip hadn’t gone too well. But they believed Canadian audiences would find The Course funny, given the Irish contingent who’d emigrated to North America.
And it all looked hugely promising. The troupe arrived at Toronto’s Pearson Airport, at the start of the Toronto Film Festival. Ordinarily, that would make no difference, but this year Roddy Doyle’s The Van was the major film being premiered.
The papers had picked up on the fact that Brendan had been nominated for a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ gong for his part and journalists’ requests for interviews flooded in. Since Brendan was the only actor from the movie who happened to be in town, it was all a godsend for the Toronto papers, a city that carries three major dailies.
Brendan couldn’t believe his luck. And he felt he had to capitalise on it.
‘We were booked to play in a small, six-hundred-seater theatre, but we reckoned that with the publicity we’d get, we had to move to a larger theatre. And we did, hiring the St Lawrence Theatre in the financial district, with two and a half thousand seats.’
The gambler was throwing the dice again. But there was a worrying sign that Brendan and Gerry’s relationship was becoming strained. Gerry had suggested everyone take an extra suitcase with them on the trip, with everyone carrying their own wardrobe. And so the actors, including Brendan, arrived at Toronto Airport and picked up the luggage, soon laden like pack mules. Except Gerry. He leapt into a taxi upon arrival and headed straight to the hotel bar. Brendan was incensed when he realised what had happened.
‘I phoned his room and got him and yelled, “I’m coming up.” And I did, and when he opened the door I chased him around the room, throwing a television set at him in the process.’
It turned out that Gerry wasn’t as badly damaged as the smashed TV set. But the incident highlighted the fact that the comedy partners weren’t entirely on the same page.
Then major disaster struck. At the last minute, The Van was withdrawn from the Film Festival.
‘It seemed Roddy Doyle and the director Stephen Frears couldn’t agree on the final cut. As a result, the film was pulled.’
And with it went the miles of column inches that the interviews with Brendan would have produced. The tickets for The Course simply didn’t sell. The first night was papered, which means tickets are given away free, in the hope word-of-mouth will encourage sales. But the second night saw only fifteen people in the audience. There were more in the cast and crew than punters in seats. More importantly, Brendan had fourteen people in hotels with no guarantee of their wages.
It didn’t matter if reviews were good, Toronto just didn’t turn out. Perhaps it was that the culture of the play was too un-Canadian. Brendan and Gerry lost £60,000 on the trip, and the Irish tour hadn’t been successful either. The reasons? Hubris. Ego. And simple economics. It was all very well taking a troupe of friends around Ireland, but they had to be paid. The Course worked in Dublin without hotel bills to pay, transport and food costs, etc. Outside of the city, it simply wasn’t viable.
However, there was another problem. The lack of cash had put a major strain on the Brendan–Gerry relationship. If their company balance sheet were a movie script, it would have been a horror, classified ‘X’ certificate.
By now, the pair were barely speaking. The blood brothers had developed anaemia.