Howie the Rookie Interview: Reviving O’Rowe’s Brutal Dublin

“As for the fish, it’s absurd that life and death can hang on something so small,” notes actor Andrew Price Carlile, reflecting on the lethal consequences of a dead Siamese fighting fish. “But I think that highlights the constant danger of living among humans who feel caged. Like living under the whole Armory of Damocles.”

Mark O’Rowe’s 1999 two-hander Howie the Rookie is a study in the lethal velocity of petty grievance. A discarded mattress and a resulting case of scabies can trigger a catastrophic cascade of violence across the grimy, neon-lit pavements of working-class Dublin. Now, 27 years after it first head-butted its way into the cultural consciousness, the piece is being resurrected at London’s Cockpit Theatre. The company responsible is Burning Coal Theatre, an outfit hailing not from the Irish capital, but from Raleigh, North Carolina. It is a bold transatlantic relocation for a script so inextricably bound to its native dialect – and we had some questions!

The Architecture of Confinement

The pairing of a Southern US theatre troupe with a script steeped in the abrasive vernacular of late-nineties Dublin might prompt a raised eyebrow. Yet, when sitting down with the creative team, the artistic logic quickly comes into focus. Director Jerome Davis views the North Carolinian perspective as a necessary counterpoint to the suffocating geography of O’Rowe’s text.

“There’s something claustrophobic—and perhaps, for some, corrosive—about an urban environment where identities are tied to man-made roads, bridges, alleyways and buildings,” Davis explains, contrasting this urban prison with the expansive geography of his home state. “There is a need within men to walk in the earth, and pavement just isn’t a great stand-in.”

“As for the fish, it’s absurd that life and death can hang on something so small,” notes actor Andrew Price Carlile, reflecting on the lethal consequences of a dead Siamese fighting fish. “But I think that highlights the constant danger of living among humans who feel caged. Like living under the whole Armory of Damocles.”

This sense of spatial and psychological strangulation defines the play’s dual protagonists: Howie Lee and The Rookie Lee. The narrative unfolds as two interlocking, sequential monologues. Actor Lucius Robinson returns to the role of Howie after first tackling the part for Burning Coal back in 2008. The passage of time has clearly altered his relationship with the character’s bruised ego.

“18 years of growing up has certainly given me a new perspective on what it means to feel trapped by your own circumstances, defined by failures, and the powerful yearning to break free when these conditions arise,” Robinson admits.

Howie’s downward spiral is ignited by the sheer indignity of catching scabies from a dumped mattress. Robinson treats this ludicrous inciting incident with the deadpan severity it requires, noting the innate physical comedy masking the horror. “I see it as a hilarious example of how the smallest, strangest things in life can lead to more profound or tragic outcomes,” he observes. Armed with physical theatre training from Dell’Arte, Robinson views the aggression not just as dialogue, but as a full-body exertion. “My training at Dell’Arte focused on the idea of character existing as mask,” he says. Despite the nightly intimacy required to embody such a deeply flawed individual, Robinson holds no illusions about forming a kinship with his alter ego. “I don’t think Howie would like me (or me him) if we were to actually meet.”

Skalds, Swords, and Agincourt Mud

Andrew Price Carlile steps into the battered shoes of The Rookie for the play’s second act, tasked with shifting the energy after Robinson’s ferocious opening stint. Carlile, a playwright as well as an actor, views his counterpart’s performance as an elemental force that he must absorb and redirect.

“Watching him attack the script for the first half of the play is like watching someone try to fight Gumby,” Carlile observes with wry accuracy. “It’s this energy I transmute and try to complement, and at times parody. His story is like if Punch found himself up to his Swazzle in Agincourt mud; mine is as if a young Prince Hal had to bowl for life-and-death stakes at Oberon’s court.”

It is a brilliant assessment of O’Rowe’s stylised, mythic treatment of pub brawls and street corners. The violence is visceral, but it is recounted with the rhythmic precision of a classical epic. Carlile approaches these brutal descriptions without a shred of melodrama, treating the text as an urgent oral history.

“The Rookie is giving his best effort to relate, not just tell the story,” Carlile insists. “It feels a little like a Skald doing Beowulf, or other tellers in other places and times giving their best version of Gilgamesh or The Iliad.”

Beneath the Homeric posturing lies a profound, animalistic vulnerability. These are young men entirely stripped of agency. Having recently inhabited the role of Gregor Samsa in a stage adaptation of Metamorphosis, Carlile finds a direct, grotesque lineage between Kafka’s giant insect and O’Rowe’s Dubliners. The true horror, he notes, is the immediate revocation of humanity the moment a person loses their utility or status.

“The most grotesque thing that happened to Gregor was not his transformation, nor the depths of depredation he endured before dying,” Carlile says. “The most grotesque aspect of that story is how Gregor, as soon as he is unable to work, is perceived as less than human.”

He maps this exact societal failure onto the world of The Rookie. “The vice jaws of apathy and violence (either physical or socioeconomic) likewise diminish the subjects’ humanity,” Carlile adds. For his character, trapped by debt over a dead Siamese fighting fish, existence is reduced to base survival. “He operates on the animal level: if he’s not rutting, he’s running for his life. The circumstances of his life are completely out of his control, and so much more is out of his grasp. He has such an atrophied connection to empathy that moments of human connection seem like mystical epiphanies.”

Refusing the Cheap Allegory

Given the current cultural preoccupation with atomised young men and the digital sinkholes of modern male resentment, one could easily force Howie the Rookie into a neat, contemporary political box. Director Jerome Davis fiercely resists such cheap allegorical readings. He refuses to reduce the play to a simple cautionary tale about internet-era tribalism.

“The most grotesque thing that happened to Gregor was not his transformation, nor the depths of depredation he endured before dying,” Carlile says. “The most grotesque aspect of that story is how Gregor, as soon as he is unable to work, is perceived as less than human.”

“I don’t think that’s what the play is about,” Davis states flatly. “I think it’s about overcoming societally enforced identities.”

He draws a sharp line between the plight of these fictional Irishmen and the systemic extraction of wealth and dignity from working-class communities everywhere, pointing out that both are subject to external forces demanding compliance. He cites American political manoeuvring to make his point. “In the US, we have something called ‘Citizens United’, which is one of the most Dickensian names I’ve ever come across, in that it was not in any way about citizens and certainly wasn’t a uniting force.”

When the elite class forces such measures on a population, Davis argues, the result is crushing. “Your choices seem to be ‘comply or die’. Howie the Rookie is, yes, about young men who have stepped into identities expected of them by those who profit from their limited, non-questioning and self-abusive lives.”

It is a bleak assessment, but Davis locates a redemptive arc within the dirt and the blood. The production, staged in-the-round at The Cockpit, strips away excess to focus entirely on this evolution. The text moves at breakneck speed, but Davis is seeking to ensure the frantic pacing does not obscure the underlying tragedy, seeking a moment of genuine grace triggered by absurd tragedies.

“I think it comes from the young men’s final realisation that nothing they have taken for granted in the past was of benefit to them,” Davis reflects. “But in Mark O’Rowe’s remarkable play, we see a young man, Howie, who finally sees through the cloud of lies laid out for him and fights back. The Rookie, stunned at seeing such empathy in action, literally goes along for the ride and emerges a much stronger, questioning man.”

Burning Coal Theatre has spent nearly three decades producing lean, urgent theatre. Their return to London with this script is an obvious challenge to audiences increasingly accustomed to passive observation, presenting a narrative that demands engagement with the uncomfortable realities of class, violence, and the desperate search for identity.

“It feels like a chance to remind people that they don’t have to accept what is given to them; they don’t have to live the lives that have been set out for them,” Davis concludes, leaning on a punk rock ethos to summarise the company’s transatlantic mission. “There’s a great documentary about Joe Strummer called The Future is Unwritten. I think that’s largely what Strummer was going on about, and I think it is captured beautifully, if subtly, in Howie the Rookie.”

Featured Image: Andrew & Lucius as Rookie and Howie Lee – provided by production