The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Mrs Brown is back on the road with live show
BACK in the Seventies and Eighties, we couldn’t get enough of fake breasts, Judy Plum wigs and support hose so thick they could easily turn the fan belt on a tractor. Yes, we loved our comedians who loved to drag up and make us laugh; Dick Emery, Danny La Rue, Stanley Baxter, Lily Savage. . .And then later the Little Britain duo emerged. And we’ve always had our panto stars, of course.
Ironically, in British society homophobia was rife and those of our dragged-up comics who happened to be gay kept their sexuality private. (Scotland didn’t make homosexuality legal until 1980).
But the world has veered in a different direction. Drag can be simply a celebration of a man dressing up as a woman, as Rue Paul’s hugely successful Drag Race has proved.
Drag is continually breaking boundaries, becoming a global phenomenon and being adopted by mainstream society. And there has been an increase in live drag events across the UK, allowing for a blurring of the lines between masculinity and femininity.
And now, thankfully, that world can sit comfortably alongside drag comedy. If there was a worry that the drag comics would come under criticism for making fun of the female form, that hasn’t happened.
Britain’s biggest drag comedian is of course Brendan O’Carroll, the Dubliner who has taken his Mrs
Brown creation across the Englishspeaking world, and conquered much of it.
Of course, the likes of O’Carroll, Emery and Baxter aren’t trying to convince as women.
They each offer(ed) up caricatures, heightened versions, their comedy creations allowed to behave in heightened form.
Baxter indeed based much of his characterisation on his own mother, Bessie. “I used the fact that she would have loved to have been a film star,” he says. “And when you have a ‘film star’ living up a Glasgow close it allows you
to have all sorts of fun.”
O’Carroll also based his Mrs Brown creation on his own mother. “She was a powerful, no-nonsense women who got things done,” he said of the former Taoiseach politician “And she kept a family together.”
The Irish comedian battled for 20 years to become successful before Mrs Brown was discovered at the Pavilion Theatre in Glasgow, by a TV producer tipped off by Rab C. Nesbitt creator Ian Pattison.
Since then Mrs Brown’s Boys has gone on to win 5 BAFTAs, 4 National Television Awards, 3 TV Choice Awards and take the twice bankrupt writer/performer’s bank account into a multimillion pound celebration.
Now, Brendan O’Carroll’s homage to his mother is back with Mrs Brown D’Live
Show: The Tour.
“It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever written,” says O’Carroll with characteristic modesty. “Even I laugh – and I know what’s coming next!”
The show is a mix of musical, with eight songs, and a storyline . . . of sorts. But judge for yourself if it’s the funniest thing ever.
Following on from his Mrs Brown film storyline, Dublin’s stouthearted stallholders have won their court case against developers who wished to close Moore Street market.
But where to find the €75,000 legal costs? The matriarch of the fruit stall, has a plum idea: put on a musical and watch the dosh roll in. A sentiment the writer himself wholeheartedly
agrees with.