A limited 10-performance run of Mark O’Rowe’s ferocious and timeless two-hander.
Structured as two interlocking monologues delivered sequentially, the play follows ‘Howie Lee’ and ‘The Rookie Lee’ across a single volatile 24-hour period in working-class Dublin. Fast-paced and foul-mouthed, ‘Howie the Rookie’ examines how young men perform toughness, dominance and emotional detachment as social currency and how quickly wounded pride can tip into violence.
Bored, restless and drifting through Dublin nightlife, Howie becomes fixated on a seemingly trivial but deeply humiliating incident. After he and his friends contract scabies from a discarded mattress, embarrassment spirals into obsession. Convinced someone else must be to blame, he embarks on a night-long mission to reclaim his honour, as bravado, drink, and peer pressure push events toward catastrophe. Meanwhile, The Rookie Lee is already in trouble, indebted to a local gangster after killing his prized Siamese fighting fish. As his precarious path collides with Howie’s escalating vendetta, comic misfortune tightens into inevitability, with fear, pride and misunderstanding driving both men towards devastating consequences.
With these two stories taken together, Howie the Rookie is a fast, visceral and brutal study of how petty incidents, boredom and humiliation snowball into devastating consequences. It exposes how status, belonging and masculine performance can eclipse instinctive compassion, and how violence becomes both currency and identity.
We caught up with director Jerome Davis to learn more about the play.
How does O’Rowe’s 1999 text prefigure the digital-age obsession with alpha status and performative masculinity?
I am opposed to any idea that fundamentally says that only one ‘group’ of people is capable of evil and that group is identifiable by the body into which they were born. That feels more than a little fascistic and it certainly isn’t the ‘liberal’ idea that I was raised on (‘don’t judge a book by its cover’, etc). The play, Howie the Rookie, is about two human beings who have been overwhelmed by the media’s obsession with violence. It was written at the end of the 1990s when uber violent and prurient acts (Menedez, Bobbitt, Lewinsky) were all over television, mass murderers like Eileen Wuornos were thought of as ‘anti-heroes’, movies by Tarantino, Mann and Verhoeven were on the rise, pornography moved from what you hid under your jacket as you left the store to being available with a keystroke on the same machine you did your family’s monthly bill paying on, and ‘reality TV’ (whatever that is!) was taking root. Violence is an easy sell, like pornography or cheeseburgers. You don’t have to be creative or even intelligent to sell a cheeseburger. In fact, subtlety is probably a negative in those industries.
Neither is good for you and not ‘good’ but certainly appealing to the baser instincts of human beings. O’Rowe seeds the play with references to this idea, from the video store that the Howie hangs out at (along with Skip Susan, herself the victim of a horrifically violent act, albeit a self-inflicted one), to the John Woo and Bruce Lee references, to the cultural hotspots that predominate both the Howie and the Rookie’s life (namely one bar after another, indistinquishable from each other except for the degree of ‘scuzz’ on the floor), where people go to drink themselves silly and fight themselves bloody). Howie the Rookie would be of no interest to me at all, were it not for the fact that O’Rowe, like Gary Owen in his magnificent play Iphigenia in Splott, paints a picture of someone on the cusp of realizing the deadend street down which this lack of empathy, coupled with an obsession with violence and alcohol has led. Effie in Iphigenia finds her way out just in time, and we may presume, goes on to live a productive, community-oriented life. One of the two young men in Howie the Rookie is not so fortunate, but he does find a kind of grace in his final moments by acting to help someone else, by moving toward empathy and by not accepting the roles that powerful, rich and well-connected people in faraway places have insisted is the mold into which he was poured at birth and into which he must live and die. And by his achievement of something like grace, he manages to possibly save the other character from a life of misery, violence and self-hatred.
In a world sliding toward nationalism, how does the character of the gangster or the hard man in the play serve as a microcosm for the political strongmen we see on the global stage today?
The Ladyboy is a violent character who has managed to harness the fear of those around him to construct a wall of impenetrability around him using stock behaviour, self-created myth, and by making himself useful to the wealthy elites that hover on the periphery of the play. He has no visible accomplishments other than these, yet he holds an exalted place in the minds his fellow citizens. We see that a lot today on many levels, certainly the political level, but also in the business world and the art world, where getting ‘shown’ in the right gallery, getting to work with the right director or getting airtime on the right podcast far, far exceeds the question of quality. Is your art any good? Do people like it? Not a concern. The concern is, did this critic give you a good review. In politics, the consequences of such despicable focus can lead to the death of many bodies. In art, it can lead to the death of many souls. And I fear that the ‘strongmen’ in both fields have bloody hands.
The play begins with something as trivial and un-masculine as an itchy skin condition. How does this specific humiliation serve as the perfect catalyst for the violence that follows?
In two ways: first as a reminder that these people are human, too. We think of a baby with a diaper rash, we think of an elderly person with shingles or ephemera, these are all human conditions, and so the writer starts out by painting this contrasting picture of the ‘tough talking loudmouth’ and the helpless child. The other way in which this serves the play is it reminds us of how easily the ‘disease’ at the heart of the play (a lack of empathy) can easily spread.
This play is famous for its structure—two monologues that never physically meet but are inextricably linked. As a director, how do you maintain the tension and visceral energy when the characters are talking to the audience rather than each other?
The energy of the players comes from the text, in the way that is true of a musical score. They can’t wait for a reaction from the audience that may never come. They have to build into their ‘score’ the response that the play demands. Whenever you do a solo or monologue play, the question looms: “Who are you talking too?” I have performed Conor McPherson’s beautiful St. Nicholas twice at Burning Coal Theatre and that play seems to be a person in a bar, telling a self-revealing ghost story in the past tense. In other plays, you might imagine the character was talking “to God” or “to the Universe” or “to themselves”. In some cases, the answer might be “talking to an audience in a theatre”. With Howie the Rookie, there may be two answers to this question. The Howie is telling the story more or less as it happens. The Rookie is telling the story, again more or less, in hindsight. This asks a lot of its audience. It asks them to shift their perspective. This is not something we can’t do or don’t do regularly when we ourselves tell a story or listen to a story being told by a friend at the office or on a park bench. We simply accept the shift in gears.
While this is a two-hander, the world is populated by gangsters, friends, and victims who never appear. How do you coach your actors to make these ghost characters feel physically present for the audience?
We have to understand them ourselves. They are all people who live in the same community, go to the same schools, shop in the same stores. They aren’t foreign even though The Howie and The Rookie want to hold them at arms’ length, they are far more alike than unalike.
O'Rowe’s writing is often compared to a musical score. Coming from a North Carolina-based company, how has your team approached the specific Dublin vernacular and rhythm to ensure it lands with a London audience? We have a wonderful dialects coach who has been working to avoid the rural Ireland cliches but to also make the language understandable in ways that some of the most intense Dublin accents don’t perhaps do. It is a balance between hearing the music of the language and understanding the meanings of the language. Like good music, the vowels find the beauty, the consonants find the clarity. The best singers understand that without both, the quality is less than ideal. Also, like good music, O’Rowe’s text needs us to hear the silences particularly clearly, which means the silences have to be surrounded by cacophony. But if you overdo the cacophony, the audience will lose interest and then the silences will fall flat.
The description mentions the play is a "fast, visceral study." How do you use the physical space of The Cockpit to reflect that sense of a snowballing catastrophe?
We have two very physically gifted actors. They keep trying to do things that make me grab the arms of my chair! I will ask “Is that safe?” and they will inevitably say “Oh, yeah” … and on we go. We want to use the space ‘in the round’ because I feel like that creates a greater sense of community within the audience. Because the play has so many unseen characters and locations, I think setting them up for the audience is important. So, when the actor makes this gesture, we understand that is always ‘Peaches’, but when they make that gesture, now we understand we are no longer looking at Peaches, but have moved on to ‘Avalanche’, for instance. Same idea for locations. The family sitting room needs to always be in the same place with the same (unseen) furniture. Because the people and the locations are so clearly drawn with O’Rowe’s words, I think we don’t need to overdo that, but just a hint will serve to keep the helter skelter nature of the story clear.
The Cockpit is known for its intimate, often in-the-round or thrust configurations. How does that proximity change the way the audience experiences the brutal and visceral descriptions of violence?
Our theatre in Raleigh is a thrust, and can be set up for any configuration, including in the round. This allows the audience to not only observe the play but observe their neighbors observing the play. It creates a sense of complicity with the audience. The audience should feel like they are part of the story, that they are standing on the street corner, looking across the street at an event going on, not viewing from a safe, unbroachable distance. They should feel like both the Howie and the Rookie are ‘theirs’ and that at any moment they could get up and slap some sense into them. Why they don’t, perhaps, is the central question of the play.
What does a North Carolina theatre company bring to an Irish play that a local UK or Irish company might miss? Does the American eye highlight different aspects of the left-behind experience?
We are from the southeastern US, and you don’t get much more ‘left behind’ than that. Politicians bray about us around election-time, but when the funds are being distributed, they almost always go elsewhere, especially where the arts are concerned. When they do go here, it is usually to build another military base or piece of equipment that will be used to drop on the heads of other ‘left behinds’ in even more far-flung places.
The play explores a world lacking positive masculine role modelling. What do you hope young men in the audience take away from the devastating consequences faced by Howie and The Rookie?
Ultimately The Howie decides to save himself. I hope that’s what young people and old people and everyone takes from the play. Stop waiting for someone to do it for you. Or to coin a phrase, ‘you are the change you are waiting for’.
Burning Coal has a history of reviving overlooked and modern classics. What was it about Howie the Rookie specifically that felt like it needed to be heard in London now, rather than two years ago or two years from now?
We recently did Iphigenia in Splott and also I saw the revival of it with the original team at the Lyric Hammersmith and I was reminded of how similar the play’s themes are. We are at a point in history when very powerful, very connected people are doing en masse what The Ladyboy attempts to do to the Rookie, namely force his will upon him. “Do what I say or I will hurt you.” This sentiment is being conveyed, writ large, through the internet and the editing, censoring and even expelling people for expressing ideas. “You must think what I think or I will hurt you.” In Howie the Rookie we are given a roadmap, a manual on how to get out of that model. In the play, The Howie steps in and beats the shit out of the gangster, even though it will cost him dearly. I fear we may be reaching that point in our society, where the elites are essentially saying “We will run the world or we will destroy the world.” If that is the choice we are given, then its time to fight.
What was the first piece of theatre you remember having a big impact on you?
Man of La Mancha. Aldonza started into ‘What Does He Want of Me?’ and the tear ducts opened. I wasn’t sure why then (I was probably 16) but I now think it had to do with that question of can we ever really understand another person. It blew me away and I still feel like it is one of the great works of theatre written in my lifetime.
What keeps you inspired?
The next one. And frankly, a whole lot of those ‘next ones’ seem to come from the pens of the Irish and the English. What’s in the ink wells here?
What would you hope someone takes away from seeing Howie and The Rookie?
You don’t have to be who they want you to be.
Howie The Rookie will be at The Cockpit Theatre for a limited 10-performance from 24th April - 2nd May. Tickets available from https://www.thecockpit.org.uk/show/howie_the_rookie
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