Taking role Les Dawson made famous

Well, it worked for Mrs Brown’s Boys creator Brendan O’Carroll…

Rab C Nesbitt star Gregor Fisher is to play a demanding grandmother in a new stage show touring Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The comic will take the lead role in Yer Granny, about a ‘diabolical’ 100-year-old whose insatiable appetite for food is eating her family out of house and home.

Also in the cast of the National Theatre of Scotland production are Jonathan Watson – known to Scots for his Hogmanay football sketch show Only A Excuse as well as playing Bob Servant’s sidekick Frank – and Paul Riley, who played Winston Ingram in Still Game.

Watson plays the head of the Russo family, who is determined to reverse the fortunes of their fish-and-chip shop, in the hope that the Queen will pop in during a jubilee visit.

Described as ‘bold and riotous’ Yer Granny is a new English-language version of Argentina’s favourite play, La Nona by Roberto La Cossa, adapted by Scottish playwright Douglas Maxwell.

The tour kicks off in Greenock on May 19 before visiting Glasgow, Edinburgh, Inverness, Belfast and Dundee.

La Nona premiered in Buenos Aires in 1977. It has been performed in the UK before and the BBC made a TV version in 1991, Grandma, starring Les Dawson as the granny, in a cast that also featured Liz Smith, Jane Horrocks, Jim Broadbent and Timothy Spall

Also in the cast are Maureen Beattie – who also starred in Rab C Nesbitt, as Ella Cotter – Brian Pettifer, recently seen in BBC’s The Musketeers, and Louise McCarthy, who was in the West End version of Mamma Mia!

Published: 19 Jan 2015