A MIX-UP in starting times meant that I had arrived late at Liverpool's Royal Court Theatre, and I could not believe what I found when I entered the auditorium.
The place was in uproar with some of the loudest and longest laughter I had heard for years. Women in the audience were choking, brushing tears from their eyes and almost falling off their seats.
On stage was Brendan O'Carroll in one of his own plays, one in which he played a brassy Irish woman named Mrs Brown, a woman who used colourful language, dominated every scene in which she appeared, and went through the jokes at full blast.
Mrs Brown has become a comedy legend, so much so that after a three-year break she is heading back to Liverpool to star at the city's largest theatre, the Liverpool Empire.
In Mrs Brown Rides Again - the third of the Mrs Brown comedies - the incorrigible battleaxe is in fighting mood when she thinks her family plan to send her to an old folks' home.
For O'Carroll, actor, playwright, novelist and stand-up comedian, the return is something special.
"It will be the biggest capacity theatre we have ever played. The largest so far has been 1,580 in one night so if we fill the Empire, which seats 2,400, it will be a record that will never be broken."
With ticket sales already booming - and the show is not due until January - it seems O'Carroll might get his wish.
Since his last appearance in the city, O'Carroll has got married: "I have married Jenny, who plays my daughter in the show," explains the Dublin-born comic.
There are echoes there of Arthur Lucan, who played the Irish washerwoman Old Mother Riley and also married the woman who played his daughter.
