THE IRISH success of Last Wedding wasn’t the only highlight of 1999. Brendan had a small part in the hit movie Angela’s Ashes, playing an undertaker, although he admits he found Frank McCourt’s book about his Limerick childhood a little depressing and didn’t make it past Chapter Ten. (Angela’s Ashes also offered work to a hopeful young actor, Danny O’Carroll. Now 16, Danny would eventually join his dad on stage playing the Buster Brady character.)
Director Alan Parker and star Bobby Carlyle were great to work with. But Brendan found filming Angela’s Ashes traumatic.
‘I accepted the part immediately. But it was only when I looked at it more closely did I realise that I would be burying children in their little white coffins. Suddenly the colour drained out of my face. All I could think about was little Brendan.
‘After the funeral scene, Bobby asked me to come out for a pint with him and the rest of the cast, but I turned him down. After filming a scene like that, I just wanted to go home. It was so emotionally draining I couldn’t bear to go out and enjoy myself, even though in retrospect it would have probably been a great way to unwind.’
Brendan’s next focus was on the upcoming Last Wedding tour. This time he was more than aware of the risks of taking out a huge production, with so many hotel rooms to pay for and mouths to feed. He knew he had a hit play. But would the UK give Mrs Brown the time of day?
Gerry Browne was dispatched to Glasgow, a hugely important city in that it was home to the Pavilion Theatre, a former variety hall and a 1,600-seater with a distinctly working-class audience. On the face of it, the Pavilion was the perfect home for Agnes and co. And so Gerry arrived at the theatre door with a plastic bag in his hand and a look of desperation on his face. But, in the Superquinn bag, he felt, lay hope. What it contained was a dog-eared copy of Mrs Brown’s Last Wedding.
But what would the no-nonsense, short-fused Pavilion manager Iain Gordon think of this Irish invasion? When the phone rang in his upstairs office to herald the arrival of a Mr Browne, Iain Gordon studied his closed-circuit camera to check out the man in the foyer. And the sight of a tall, slightly scruffy, slightly desperate-looking man clutching a supermarket plastic bag didn’t impress him.
Upstairs in the office, Iain Gordon told Gerry Browne straight off he’d never heard of him or Brendan O’Carroll. And why should he even think about staging an unknown Irish play in his town?
But he liked Gerry Browne’s upbeat attitude, and loved the fact he seemed a trier, and said he would read the script. He did – but the result wasn’t good. The theatre boss reckoned the play was ‘as funny as piles’.
Gerry persisted, arguing how well it had gone down in Dublin. Iain Gordon listened, but didn’t agree. It was only when he brought in an actor friend to read it aloud in an Irish accent that it seemed to make sense.
The Glasgow theatre boss agreed to take the chance on the play, splitting the box-office receipts. But there was a problem. The Pavilion manager reckoned a new play needed £25,000 spent on advertising, which Brendan and Gerry would pay half of. But Brendan and Gerry, still with massive debts, had no money. Zero. Gerry was in fact sticking the travel costs on his Visa card.
Gerry asked Iain Gordon for an advance. It was highly unusual, but the gruff Glasgow theatre boss put his hand in his pocket and gave the Irishman the money for the hotels.
The Pavilion boss also paid for the radio and newspaper advertising. But the strategy didn’t work. Ticket sales were disastrous.
And when the Irish hopefuls turned up for technical rehearsals the day before the show opened in June 1999, the Pavilion boss was dismayed by what he saw. He reckons the set was the cheapest, tackiest, ever. And Brendan and co. ‘looked to be a team of losers’.
To make matters worse, ticket sales for the week were dreadful. June is not a great month for theatres anywhere, but this was disastrous. A few hundred tickets had been sold for the opening night, but that was in a two-for-one deal.
The entire ticket sales for the week were just £5,000 (an average production would take in from £50,000 to £80,000 for the week) and the Pavilion boss was all set to pull the production.
‘I wouldn’t have blamed him,’ says Brendan. ‘The advertising hadn’t worked. No one had ever heard of the Mrs Brown character. Why would they come?’
However, Brendan made an appeal to Iain Gordon.
‘I walked into his office and said, ‘If you stick with this play, I will make you a million quid.’ Now, the truth is, I didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. But it turned out to be true.’
The theatre boss announced to Brendan and Gerry that he’d run the show until the end of the week, and then it would be pulled. He was cutting his losses.
On opening night, however, the theatre boss was amazed by what he witnessed on stage. It didn’t matter if the set looked a bit ramshackle, the audience simply loved Last Wedding. And Iain Gordon, a man who guards his emotions more carefully than the box-office takings, says he laughed louder than he’d ever laughed in his life. By the end of the week, a minor miracle on Renfield Street was taking place. Those who’d seen the first few nights had gone home and told their friends. The box-office phone sparkled like the generators Brendan, John Breen and Jimmy Matthews had once slept near. And the theatre boss kept the doors open for a second week. On one day alone, the Pavilion till took £20,000.
‘You have to take your hat off to Iain Gordon. He didn’t know us from Adam. He gave us the theatre with no rent and no guarantees. He showed a lot of balls.’
This was The Course all over again, except it set a pattern of success that would continue for the next decade.
That run at the Pavilion alone saw Mrs Brown’s Last Wedding pull in £400,000. Brendan had conquered Glasgow, which would become his favourite venue in the UK, with the Agnes Brown plays going on to pull in millions.
(Bugsy made his first appearance on stage at the Pavilion, playing the role of Grandad, in a cameo. The former window-cleaner, now instantly recognisable, is today besieged for autographs wherever he goes.)
Thankfully, Liverpool and Manchester followed suit. Not quite in the same numbers as Glasgow, but the Mrs Brown train, packed with friends and family, was now funded – and off and running.
However, in London, at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, it came off the rails, in terms of the broadsheet reviews and box office.
‘It is potentially a fine enough comic set-up, and gets plenty of laughs,’ said the Financial Times. ‘However, the thing is, most of the laughs are titters of genteel shock that O’Carroll has taken a mildly smirksome line and inserted the word “fuckin” into it. I began to keep a tally of the number of laugh lines he gave himself which did not include that or another expletive; by the end of the show, I had spotted a grand total of five.
‘The audience, on the other hand, were by the end so ready to laugh at anything that they giggled through the climactic mother–daughter sentimentality.’
The reviewer added, ‘The play exists somewhere between Roddy Doyle-land and the territory of Caroline Aherne’s The Royle Family, with a cousin of Les Dawson’s Ada in charge.’
The review highlighted a couple of important points: the broadsheets weren’t keen on what they thought was lowbrow entertainment; yet, those in the audience loved Brendan’s broad comedy strokes.
Sadly, Last Wedding played to houses little more than a third full in Hammersmith. Brendan and Gerry didn’t have the money to back the full-scale advertising campaign needed in London.
Yet Brendan wasn’t overly worried.
‘Fuck London,’ he said at the time.
And, after all, the northern cities loved Agnes. But sadly, overall box-office success didn’t cement the relationship between Brendan and Gerry. Gerry was dealing with his own problems. He’d had enough of travelling with the O’Carroll circus and decided it was time to step off the carousel.
Gerry decided he would break up the partnership on the night of the premiere of Agnes Browne in Dublin in November. At the time, the former milkman had a broken ankle he’d sustained in a football match but, more importantly, a broken spirit. He had spent too many years living in a metaphorical tent and he reckoned his wife and two kids were paramount. He’d watched Brendan’s marriage break up and didn’t want his to go the same way.
Even though Gerry was desperately broke, he chose to walk away from the upcoming plays, the Mrs Brown royalties, everything.
What had happened between the pair to break up such an incredible friendship? Two men going at different speeds, sometimes in different directions? Perhaps.
Or perhaps they were like many seemingly inseparable double acts such as Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Abbott and Costello, Little and Large, there simply comes a time when they have to separate.
‘It was on the cards, I guess. During the difficult times we would have rows and Gerry would get angry and say, “You bastard! I’ve looked after you since we were kids . . .”
‘And I’d yell back, “You didn’t, Gerry. We made it up!”
‘“Well, I would have . . .”
‘It had all become confused. We simply weren’t on the same page any more.’
The pair had loved each other like brothers. Somehow, life got in the way.
Film director Jim Sheridan landed Gerry a couple of small roles in movies, but Brendan’s former best friend was not after the limelight – he happily went from making a movie with Anjelica Huston and Tom Jones to gigging in a hotel bar for £200. However, he was content to be living a life he could control.
Brendan believed it was time to go it alone.
‘What I do think was that Gerry believed his own publicity. In his own way, though, he was a lovable guy.’
Brendan had lost his best friend. Benny and Gerry, who’d shared debts, reviews, holiday apartments with their wives (and even beds back in the touring days when they were skint), were no longer an item.
But Brendan had greater problems to contend with.