NOT many builders sing opera at work but comedian and political activist, Mark Thomas’s father did.

And now Mark is reviving Bravo Figaro! – the play he wrote about the life of his father – for one week only before it tours in Australia and New Zealand this spring.

Bravo Figaro! is at Forest Arts Centre, New Milton on Friday, January 23 and the Ashcroft Centre, Fareham on Saturday 24.

“It will be great to revisit it,” says Mark. “I am very proud of the show and it is probably one of my favourite pieces.”

A rough, and occasionally violent, man, Colin Alec Todd Thomas was a working class Tory builder who developed a love of opera.

When Colin, a ‘force of nature’ in Mark’s life, was diagnosed with progressive suprnuclear palsy – a degenerative and incurable condition leading to paralysis and dementia – his life began to fall apart, he couldn’t walk or talk, needed 24 hour care and was almost totally unable to communicate with his family.

Poignant, personal and yet powerfully humorous, Bravo Figaro!

beautifully blends stand-up with theatre and sees Mark wear his heart on his sleeve when he tells the story of his father as his illness progresses and his crowning moment as a son – his attempt to put an opera on in his parents’ home.

Mark took the Royal Opera House singers into his parents’ bungalow in Bournemouth to try to reconnect with his father through the music that he loved so much. Bravo Figaro! is the story of that performance and the lives of his family leading up to it.

“Dad loved opera and I hated it,” explains Mark. “He liked Rossini and Verdi and he really liked Placido Domingo, but I think Pavarotti was my parent’s favourite.

“We had a relative that died and left us money, but who nobody particularly liked. I didn’t really want it so I used it to buy my parents tickets to see Pavarotti live.

“When my dad became ill, I started to listen to opera myself. He was a force of nature that had been taken really low by this disease and it was my way of reaching out to him. I was invited to be the first ever guest on Radio 4’s Saturday Live Inheritance Tracks slot, talking about music that reminds me of my family.”

First commissioned by London’s prestigious Royal Opera House, Bravo Figaro! went on to sell out at the 2012 Edinburgh Festival and won Mark his first Scotsman Fringe First Award alongside a Herald Angel Award and numerous five and four star reviews. It was also broadcast on Radio 4 in April 2013.

“On the morning Radio 4 was due to broadcast the show, my dad died.

"We, as a family, sat with him all day before the undertakers came.

“But it was just typical of him to commit the ultimate heckle on the morning of a show that was about him!”

Bravo Figaro! is different from Mark’s usual hands on stand-up and political satire mixed with journalism – he is wellknown as a campaigning comedian, exposing corporate or governmental wrongdoings and most proud of his Ilusi Dam Campaign, which was successful in temporarily blocking the development of a large-scale hydroelectric dam in southeast Turkey that would have led to the displacement of around 78,000 people, mostly Kurds, and environmental and cultural destruction.

Mark has said his passion for politics was inherited from his father, although he didn’t inherit his ideology of Thatcherism.

But that’s not all that he learned from his father, somewhere along the way Mark stopped hating opera and started to take pleasure in it: “I do enjoy opera now, maybe not the same opera as my dad did, but two of my favourite composers are Philip Glass and John Adams.”

For more information, or to book, please visit markthomasinfo.co.uk.