HOWIE THE ROOKIE
Cockpit Theatre
★★★
“There are moments of pure poetry to enjoy”
First performed in 1999 Howie the Rookie, Mark O’Rowe’s two-hander, could still be a play for today a quarter of a century later . Because what it explores, forensically, is how unexamined emotion and trapped energy erupts catastrophically into seemingly mindless violence.
Violence is never mindless. It is often, as here, the result of damage, hurt feelings, social environment and, possibly, a wrong-headed belief in what it means to act like a man. Through ninety minutes of two fast-paced monologues, interlocking but presented in sequence, we follow two very different characters in the streets of an depressed Dublin neighbourhood. The clue is in the play’s title. Howie Lee and Rookie the Lee are not related but their emotional preoccupations, one with humiliation, the other with fear, bring them into collision.
Howie, played with brilliant comic toughness by Lucius Robinson has become fixated on a very ordinary incident – he and his friends have contracted scabies from a discarded mattress. Howie is bored, restless and, now, on the hunt for someone to blame, with a vendetta to occupy the night. Into his orbit drifts The Rookie Lee – Andrew Price Carlile – a local ladies man of softer appearance but an equally ruthless take on life and love. What is moving him is just as apparently trivial: he is in trouble for killing the prized Siamese fighting fish of a local gangster.
Director Jerome Davis keeps the two monologues quite separate, with only a ghost-like appearance of the alternate player in each sequence, cleverly suggesting the shadow nature of the two parts. The set (Xinyuan Li) is bare – a suggestion of a grimy pavement on the floor, a red chair for a prop and lighting changes to indicate the darkening of the narrative. Davis is working with two ferociously talented actors whose physicality brings the challenging script to life. All the play’s lighter moments are brought fully into view: Robinson and Carlile are faultless in using gesture, pace, and rhythm to bring out the contrast between the trope of thugs and the reality of their human side.
Unfortunately, the vernacular proved a stumbling block. While Robinson and Carlile have mastered the speed required, the use of dialect calls for a precision that the speech lacked. It is a problem for actors that while Irish accents are relatively easy to mimic, they are also almost impossible for a non-native to replicate. The ‘ring’ you feel when an Irish actor speaks (think Gleeson and Buckley) is a thrill that was missing. Here, it also made the words sometimes difficult to follow and therefore the narrative arc got lost – a problem compounded by the Cockpit being in the round so that at least half the time the actors are speaking with their back to you.
In summary, this is a play very well worth seeing, with important insights, a message to convey and played by highly skilled actors, whose words are a little hard to follow. Familiarity with Rowe’s classic of Irish drama would help. There are moments of pure poetry to enjoy in this harsh examination of the underside of Dublin.
HOWIE THE ROOKIE
Cockpit Theatre
Reviewed on 24th April 2026
by Louise Sibley
