Tag Archives: Cockpit Theatre

I’M A PHILOSOPHER! WHY THE F*CK AM I HERE?

★★★★

Cockpit Theatre

Reviews, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’M A PHILOSOPHER! WHY THE F*CK AM I HERE?

Cockpit Theatre

★★★★

“disciplined, charming and quick”

JJ, Tommy, Randy, Judy, Pete and Jordo. Into the jungle they go, like the retired footballers, disgraced politicians and other minor celebs before them. Except in Roger Francis’ script, it’s the West’s canonical philosophers who are made to eat their words, humble pie and insects, while duking it out for the audience’s affections. The premise underneath I’m a Philosopher! Why The F*** am I Here? is that the jungle format is underpinned by philosophy in action: scarcity, coalition, betrayal, and mob justice.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Senne Lambrechts), having written so admiringly of natural man, is finally in an environment that puts his ideas to the test. In this ungovernable group, Thomas Hobbes (Oscar Nicholson) has his ideas about life outside society confirmed.

Will Robertson plays both the Australian animal liberation utilitarian Peter Singer and the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, a pairing with a real satirical point folded in. Singer’s ethics forbid him from eating fauna. Peterson’s carnivore diet forbids him from eating flora.

As in reality TV, the audience votes cast members off the show. The evening I went, the audience disposed of Ayn Rand and Judith Butler, both played with great energy, skill and charm by Laura Shipler Chico. These women were at the opposite end of every argument. So it is difficult to come to any conclusion about these two evictions, apart from noting the obvious: Rand and Butler were the only two women in the jungle.

The double casting prevented what might have been the two most delicious scenes in the play: a confrontation between Singer and Peterson and another between Rand and Butler.

Maddie Hurley’s direction keeps all four performers braced for whichever way the audience votes. Jess Beith brilliantly stage-manages the nightly improvisation. The company absorbs this unpredictability with a breeziness that must be far harder to achieve than it looks.

Lip-synced musical numbers arrive with no warning or justification. “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive” lands just as the group concludes it has nothing positive left to accentuate. Angela Botha’s choreography sells the nerve of it.

The philosophy is broad-brush. Ideas exist here to feed punchlines rather than the reverse. No matter. Shipler Chico, twice ejected by popular vote, returns as a bear and eats Peter Singer. The utilitarian is devoured by the objectivist.

Make My Show has created an evening that is disciplined, charming and quick, gone well before it could outstay its welcome. That’s far better than can be said for the format it is mocking.



I’M A PHILOSOPHER! WHY THE FUCK AM I HERE?

Cockpit Theatre as part of Camden Fringe

Reviewed on 13th August 2026

by Elizabeth Botsford

Photography by Soren Harrison 


 

 

 

 

I’M A PHILOSOPHER

I’M A PHILOSOPHER

I’M A PHILOSOPHER

HOWIE THE ROOKIE

★★★

Cockpit Theatre

Reviews, , , , , , , , , ,

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


 

 

 

 

HOWIE THE ROOKIE

HOWIE THE ROOKIE

HOWIE THE ROOKIE