BRENDAN’S career was in meltdown and in the autumn of 1998 his personal life was now in crisis. Since the success (and financial failure) of The Course, his time had been spent on the road, in Hollywood, in bank managers’ offices, with his troupe of touring players or in television studios.
And during this journey the distance between Brendan and Doreen became unbridgeable. They no longer lived in the same world. Brendan was living his life at a speed Doreen couldn’t possibly match.
Was there one moment when he knew all was lost?
‘No, well, maybe the more I got into show business . . . But there was something else. Couples, as they get older, look back and say, “Remember when we lived in that one room in Tallaght and there was just the two of us and we had no money and robbed milk off somebody’s doorstep? Weren’t we so happy then?” When you start saying, “Where did that go?”, you know it’s a warning sign.
‘And that happened to Doreen and me. Couples are at their happiest and best working against adversity. When that’s gone, you take a long look at your own life. I did. I didn’t look at Doreen and say, “It’s her fault.” I looked at myself and said, “I’m not happy.” Basically, my marriage separation happened because I wasn’t happy. I couldn’t even explain why. Yet, for years, I was afraid to tell Doreen. I hid those feelings, wondering how you can love someone and feel hollow inside.’
Brendan had pots of adversity in his life in the form of massive debt. But adversity has to be shared to keep a couple strong. Brendan wasn’t sharing his problems with Doreen. In fact, he wasn’t sharing much of anything.
By this point, Jenny had become a major feature in Brendan’s life, appearing with him on stage and on film. And she was now his best friend and business confidante. He maintains they hadn’t become a couple during their working time together, but there’s no doubt they had a strong emotional attachment. It was Jenny he had called from LA when he was in the doldrums. And Jenny had backed Brendan not only with cash, but unstinting loyalty.
‘When you are an artist – and I am an artist – and you are out and about, your greatest wish is for everybody to know you. That’s what you are trying to achieve. But Doreen felt she was living in a goldfish bowl.
‘It wasn’t because of Jenny that we separated, it was because of the pressures of show business. Doreen would be at home lonely and I would be away lonely. The two of us just went in different directions. I felt as if I was standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and there was no one standing beside me to share the exquisite view.’
But break-ups of 23-year-old marriages are seldom less than awful.
‘It wasn’t that I was saying, “I don’t want to be Doreen’s husband,” I was saying, “I can’t be anyone’s husband. So much to do, so little time.” But sitting down with someone you love and admire and saying, “I’m not happy here,” is bad enough, but trying to explain, “It’s not your fault,” is even worse.
‘Many wives, in this situation, would feel, “It must be my fault”, or say, “You’re lying. If not to me, then to yourself,” as Doreen did.
‘But what I was saying was, “I’m not happy with the whole thing. I’ve got to step away from it.” The rot was a basic unhappiness I hadn’t sorted out. And, remember, we were fourteen when we met. Maybe it wasn’t about love back then. Maybe we got married because I felt it was about keeping a promise.
‘Whatever, when the end came I felt guilty, especially about the manner in which we’d broken up. I’d rather I’d been more honest, told her what I was feeling. I was arrogant. I thought she’d fall apart and I should have gone earlier.
‘I knew I was taking the first step by leaving Doreen. Yet the loneliness at the start, in my apartment, was dreadful.’
Brendan had bought an apartment in the city’s Temple Gate. As if being insolvent weren’t enough, he had to cope without his family life and seeing his three kids on a daily basis. And he admits he simply couldn’t cope.
‘This really was the most depressing time of my life. I sat in my living room for two days with my arms crossed. I couldn’t move. Eventually, the second night I got down on my knees, and I prayed, like I did when I was a child. I prayed to my mother. “Mam, I hope you can hear this, but if you can, I know that you can help me. Give me the answer to how I can get through this.”
‘And that night I went to sleep and I had the most incredible dream. I dreamt I was in my office, an office I didn’t even have at the time, and the phone rang. And the secretary buzzed and said, “That’s your mother on the phone, Brendan.”
‘And I said, “Sure, I’ve been expecting the call.” So I took the call and it was my mother. And I told her I needed help. And she said, “Sure, Brendan, if you have the strength to get down on your knees and pray, you can get back up again and get on with life. Now do it!” And I woke up the next morning and I did.’
Brendan’s tone turns upbeat as he continues the story.
‘We have an old saying in Ireland: God doesn’t give you a cross to bear that you can’t carry. And really what we’re saying is, life is preparing you for every little thing. And rarely do you come across something that completely devastates you. You’ve had preparation for that somewhere along the line.’
What to do, though? The comedy gigs paid the mortgage on the house in Ashbourne and the rental on the flat. But there was the company debt the size of Dublin Palace to consider.
One September morning, a magic moment occurred in the form of a phone call from John Costigan, manager of one of Dublin’s most prestigious theatres, The Gaiety.
‘John had loved The Course, and he liked me. So he asked me to have a coffee with him in a café in Chapel Street.
‘He said, “Listen Brendan. I’ve got three weeks free in the Gaiety in February. And Denis (Desmond, the owner of the Gaiety and the most important man in Irish showbiz) says he wants you to scribble up something for that time.”’
Scribble up? What that very loose language translated to was that Denis Desmond wanted Brendan to write, hopefully, a hit play that would fill the theatre. But Brendan couldn’t take on that sort of task. He was flattened. He didn’t have the confidence to write a postcard, never mind another hit play.
‘I said, “Jaysus, John. I don’t know. I really don’t know.”’
To complicate matters, John said they would agree upon a joint production – split the costs and, hopefully, split the box office. Now, to most theatre producers, this is a perfectly reasonable suggestion. However, the set-up costs to Brendan would be around £50–60,000. Now, Brendan didn’t have fifty/sixty pence. In reality, he owed more than £2 million.
‘I was feckin’ fecked,’ he says, summing up his financial position with clarity and colour. ‘And I told John this.’
However, John Costigan had envisaged this problem and had a plan.
‘Look, Brendan. Denis says he will advance you the money. And he will later take it off the top of the bestseller.’
‘Bestselling what? I haven’t even an idea.’
‘Ah, but Denis says you’ll come up with something.’
‘So, I said okay. And I really appreciated this. Denis is a really kind man. But then over the next couple of months I thought and wondered what the hell I would write about. And I realised I had to look back at what had failed, and bury it in my head. But I also had to look back and realise what had succeeded.
‘And it came to me. Mrs Browne had succeeded. The radio stories had been a great success. And the books had done great business. And I thought, “What about a Mrs Browne play?” Then I began to think what would give an Agnes Browne play a device, an obvious backdrop for tension. And I thought, “A wedding. That could be the answer!” And with that in mind I wrote the play in four days.’
It was a phenomenal effort. Typing eighty pages of script alone could take a couple of days.
‘I suppose the character was already in my head, and I found her so easy to write for. I’d go to bed at night and dream up storylines for her. I just knew how she would react in any situation.’
Of course he did. He was writing about his own life. He was writing about his mammy. He was writing about the relationship between a mother and her kids, which could change in a heartbeat from ‘loving the very bones of them’, as Agnes would say, to trashing them with a wicked one-liner. When Brendan came up with the storylines he only had to think about the confusion in his own house, of how his mother was so switched on, but couldn’t switch on a fridge. He only had to recall the wisdom, the philosophy of Maureen O’Carroll, and transpose it into another frame. He also knew of the depth of the relationship between an Irish mother and her sons, and he knew the debates that came about as daughters grew into their mothers. He only had to think about how his mother could be a little hoity-toity at times to come up with Agnes’s telephone voice, or the faint hint of deference she’d show when meeting Maria’s posh mother. Brendan might not have realised it at the time, but his mammy was looking down on him as he battered the typewriter keys. But the real reason Brendan found it so easy? He loved writing about this world, his own world, which he could now recreate in fictional form. And, as for the supporting cast? Brendan based them on characters he’d known as a kid, taking elements of personality and amplifying them.
Brendan already had his key characters. Jenny played Cathy, Derek Reddin played Rory, Dino was played by Gerry Browne, Dermot was Simon Young and Mark was played by Ciaron McMahon, who played Tony in The Course. Eilish played Winnie McGoogan.
The storyline is simple: Agnes Browne is trying to plan her son Trevor’s wedding to the posh Maria, aided by her gay son Rory and his lunatic hairdresser boyfriend, Dino.
Audiences are invited along for the hen party, a stag party and a dinner party with a difference. And when Agnes tries to impress her son’s prospective mother-in-law by installing a new downstairs toilet – well, you can just imagine.
‘So I rang John Costigan and told him I’d written a script and I offered to send it over. But John and Denis said they were happy to see it on opening night.
‘That, to me, was a massive vote of confidence. And I will never forget Denis for giving me that lift.’
Yet, while Brendan was able to capture Agnes’s voice on radio, how could he possibly look like a 60-year-old woman? He rang Tom McInnerney, who’d worked on Grandad’s Sure.
‘I said, “Look, you know Mrs Browne, you’ve read about her, I want you to make me up as Mrs Browne.”’
But there was a slight catch. Brendan didn’t want any mirrors in the room. He didn’t want to see the transformation take place. He wanted to see the complete, finished result.
‘I was made up and I began talking as Mrs Browne, using the voice saying, “Mary had a little lamb . . .” and as I talked I walked towards a mirror, looked up and said [Mrs Browne voice], “Hello!” – and she was standing there in front of me. I thought, “This is going to work.”’
Writing the play had given Brendan confidence. He sensed he had a winner. The plan was to open Mrs Browne’s Last Wedding in Cork, at the Everyman Palace Theatre, for five nights, before moving on to Dublin.
Brendan didn’t want to open the production in Dublin: that would be too risky with an untested play. Far better to open out of town, take the opportunity to iron out wrinkles, see if the cast all gelled, and make the mistakes that wouldn’t matter too much.
That said, he desperately wanted the Cork run to work. He knew that good reviews would reach his home town.
The next step was to call Gerry in and ask him to arrange dates in Liverpool, Glasgow and Manchester. Brendan knew he had to tour. He knew he could make money.
But then everything seemed to be going mad. Things weren’t helped by the reception the cast received when they arrived in Cork, on the day before the Monday show.
Brendan was met by the front-of-house manager, who announced that the sales were ‘disappointing’, which is a trade euphemism for ‘You may as well open an artery and let the blood flow into the stalls.’
Brendan was knocked by the news, but he took an upbeat line, saying, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ He tried to console himself with the fact that this was just a warm-up for Dublin. And he desperately hoped the week in Cork would at least pay for itself.
There was another worrying sign, however. Good first-night reviews are vital to the success of a play, but on opening night, the reviewer for the Cork Examiner was ill, so the paper sent their opera/culture critic.
‘The house manager was shitting himself when she arrived.’
Brendan was truly nervous. He was dragging his old debts around and was also risking having to pay back Denis Desmond’s investment, should the play go belly-up. The last thing he wanted was for the first review to be negative.
Bizarrely, given how skint Ireland’s two Likely Lads were, Brendan and Gerry decided to donate the profits from their world premiere show to the Chernobyl Children’s Project. And it wasn’t uncharacteristic of the pair. They gave money over to charity projects on a regular basis.
The Cork Examiner described how ‘the partners and life-long friends would be making many young children happy.’
But would they put a smile on the faces of grown-ups that week in February? The production was already facing a minor meltdown.
‘We didn’t even have a dress rehearsal, and we were so far behind with the technical rehearsals when the lights went up for that very first scene, with me in Agnes Browne’s living room, the cast saw me as her for the very first time. Jenny says from that moment, she never saw me as Brendan O’Carroll on stage, she just saw The Mammy.
‘I also wanted Agnes to be totally believable to the cast. This wasn’t as it had been in rehearsals, with the cast speaking lines to a bloke with a moustache. They had to be speaking to their mother.’
And they were. Brendan’s Agnes was bang on the money. She looked like Maureen O’Carroll and she had many of her mannerisms. On top of that, Brendan had unconsciously added little bits of Gerry Browne’s mammy, too, and of Dolly Dowdall and Cecil Sheridan’s stage dames. This wasn’t a woman up there on stage, although she had the walk, the demeanour, the presence. But it wasn’t a caricature either. It was as close as you can get without removing the Adam’s Apple and the usual male instrumentation. The Monday night audience bought into Brendan’s performance completely. His stage version of the character he’d created on radio was hilarious, and the audience loved her from the moment she shuffled onto the stage.
They also loved her friend, Winnie. What the audience didn’t realise was that Winnie was far from the doddery old lady she appeared on stage; that Eilish O’Carroll had done a fantastic job of getting into character. She had achieved it by creating a picture in her head of who Winnie should look like, based on her mammy’s friend, Nancy Pimley. Nancy was a bright Winnie, but always in awe of Maureen O’Carroll.
And all the other characters gelled. A standing ovation followed the curtain drop and, after the show, the cast celebrated like it was Christmas and New Year combined.
All except Brendan. He had other matters on his mind.
‘At this time, Fiona was sixteen and she was working on the ships to Le Havre as a receptionist. She called me in tears. She was being worked for twenty-two-hour stretches and had had enough. So I said to leave the ferry when she came back and I’d pick her up in Wexford. And I set off at four a.m. to collect her and took her for breakfast and to cheer her up, and she was grand.’
The newspaper reviews were also grand.
‘The Cork Examiner review began, “I was met at the door of the theatre before the show started by the front-of-house manager, Vincent. He obviously wasn’t expecting to see me. He said, ‘Welcome to the show, but let me just forewarn you. This is not Shakespeare.’ But you know, I’ve seen this play and I have to say this is Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote for the Penny Circle. Shakespeare wrote for people who have dreary lives, who get to come and watch their lives being lit up on stage and have the opportunity to laugh at themselves. This is what Shakespeare did. And this is indeed Shakespeare.”’
The review helped box-office sales, but word-of-mouth was the major factor. By lunchtime on Tuesday, that night’s play was sold out. And the rest of the week quickly sold out too. Brendan’s wings began to appear again.
‘The theatre manager asked us if we would extend the show to Saturday and Sunday. And we didn’t want to let him down – he’d shown faith in us – so we agreed. And we weren’t opening until the Tuesday in the Gaiety, so it was all feasible.’
But there was a problem to overcome. The actress who played Betty said she didn’t want to perform at the weekend. She said she wasn’t signed up for the weekend, and she’d made plans to go out with her boyfriend.
‘I said, “Look love, this is the acting business. You have to work when the opportunity is there. And, even more importantly, if this play does well, and I think it might, we could extend our run. And we’re going to Dublin for three weeks. Who knows what will happen?” But she stuck her heels in. “I’m not doing Saturday and Sunday,” she argued. And I said, “Okay, no problem.”’
Brendan came up with a ready solution. Once again he decided to pick a wild flower from the garden. In this case it was Sheila Carty, who ran the theatre bar. Brendan reckoned she had a great personality, which came across after the shows when she would get up and sing with the jazz band.
So why not put her up there on stage?
‘I said to her that night, “Sheila, I want you to watch the play tonight really closely, in particular the part of Betty. Because, on Saturday, I want you to play Betty.”
‘She looked shocked and said, “Oh, I couldn’t, Brendan. I’ve never acted.”’
But she could. And she did. Sheila would go on to tour with the cast as Betty for the next two years.
The next stop was Dublin. And the play took the town by storm, going on to run at the Gaiety for an incredible 15 weeks, beating the audience records for The Course.
Yet, Brendan says he was a little more subdued by success this time around.
‘I didn’t ever go back to the thinking that I owned the sun,’ he says. ‘I came off stage feeling thankful that we’d gotten away with it, that we’d had a wonderful day. And that’s the way I’ve felt ever since.’
He adds, ‘I’m always saying to Jenny, “Hey, it’s the end of the day and we’re still alive.”’
Now, all Brendan and Gerry had to do was take Mrs Browne on tour. But they were both entirely aware that having a hit play in your home town doesn’t guarantee success anywhere else.
However, Brendan believed he had to take the gamble.