Loud-mouthed Irish matriarch Agnes Brown may be familiar with some Maltese viewers thanks to the odd YouTube video of her and her antics doing the rounds on Facebook and the like.
Brown is the protagonist of the UK/Irish sitcom Mrs Brown’s Boys, a Bafta award-winning comedy that has also been on radio shows, in books and on stage.
The character is the alter-ego of Brendan O’Carroll, the story’s creator, star, and writer, who after the series’ success in various media decided that the next step was to take the character and the ensemble for a foray onto the big screen.
Brown looks after her family after the death of her husband and works at a fruit and vegetable stall in a Dublin market. In Mrs Brown’s Boys D’Movie, Mrs Brown’s livelihood comes under threat from a ruthless developer, so she and her family embark on a campaign to save her stall, aided by a motley troop of blind trainee ninjas, an alcoholic solicitor, and a barrister with an unhelpful affliction.
In D’Movie Mrs Brown is up against grander forces than the usual family squabbles for what promises to be a rip-roaring comic romp
As daughter Cathy Brown turns her back on the family business, troublesome duo Danny and Buster get in over their heads, and unwanted secrets emerge from Agnes’s own past, could the Brown matriarch finally be out of her depth?
“D’Movie came together reasonably easily in that when we were doing the TV series, we had nearly completed a circle,” explains O’Carroll. “It started in radio, went to novels, plays, television. The only part of the circle that wasn’t completed was making a movie. We’d even done an animated series. The movie was the only piece that was left.”
And so, he and his ensemble of family and friends take the madcap adventures of the loudest, proudest mother in Ireland, to the streets of Dublin. On stage and in the TV show, Mrs Brown had saucepans and sofas. In Mrs Brown’s Boys D’Movie she has a movie budget to muck around with.
D’Movie, explains director Ben Kellett, was always part of the master plan: “When we did our first series, Brendan said there would be three series, specials, and a movie, and that we’d win a Bafta. I kid you not; all those things have come true.”
Yet this story is not an homage to the hit BBC show, the radio programmes, books or theatrical plays. Mrs Brown’s Boys D’Movie is its own beast. Agnes Brown has never been one to shy away from confrontation, but in D’Movie she’s up against grander forces than the usual family squabbles for what promises to be a rip-roaring comic romp.
Joining O’Carroll are cast regulars Jennifer Gibney, Paddy Houlihan, Fiona O’Carroll, Danny O’Carroll, Pat Shields, Amanda Woods, Rory Cowan, Martin Delany, Gary Hollywood, Dermot O’Neill, Martin Delany, Eilish O’Carroll and newcomers Simon Delaney, Robert Bathurst and Dermot Crowley.