Howie the Rookie review: A vivid poignant broadcast from Mark O’Rowe’s Dublin underworld

Glass Mask's streamed theatre production, in conjunction with the Lock Inn, rediscovers the darkness and violence of Mark O'Rowe's breakout play. Photo: Seán Doyle

The Lock Inn 

★ ★ ★ ★

The last outing for Howie the Rookie - Mark O’Rowe’s excellent, breakout play set in a wild Dublin underworld - was an interesting flashpoint. It was the astounding bravura of Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, in his performance as all the characters, which elevated the seemingly ordinary details to heroic form, as if embodying an epic poem about the city. Without that production, it’s difficult to imagine having plays like Dublin Oldschool, Walk For Me and Sure Look It, Fuck It. 

There is sometimes a drawback to that spoken word lyricism in drama. It paints the city in stunning colours but the plot can easily be left to slacken. Poetic detail comes in at dizzying velocity that’s difficult to take in one sitting. Productions freestyle too much to follow.

Glass Mask’s streamed production, in conjunction with the online venue the Lock Inn, shears some of the poetry previously seen in Howie the Rookie but it has a sharp vividness that cuts deep. Rediscovering the pleasurable contrast between the two central characters - the brawler-for hire Howie and the heavily indebted lothario Rookie - it evokes the mythos surrounding the play’s debut production. If Stephen Jones lives up to the endearing brutishness of Aidan Kelly, then Rex Ryan beams the charming swag of Karl Shiels. 

Broadcast live from a black box studio, O’Rowe’s play, written in two interlocking monologues, is ideal for the demands of streamed theatre - aside from the poignant conjuring of busy city streets now emptied by the pandemic. The camera-eye substitutes the face-front address to the audience. The tagging in and out of Jones and Ryan allows for social distancing. Though the play has found physical movement in the past to punctuate its script, Seán Doyle’s restrained cinematography mostly prefers standstill waist-up shots, as if filming a fraught testimonial. 

If the meticulous production gives the play an unhurried pace, that’s because some details of O’Rowe’s blazing tale now deserve closer attention. There’s a scene when Ryan’s Rookie - described by virtually everyone as “handsome,” even his enemies - tries to seduce a woman into loaning him money she saved for her brother’s schooling. “I will teach him the manly things of how to survive in a world of pain,” he barters. 

Few artists have shown the stranglehold of that myth than Jones, in his own plays From Eden and Northern Lights. As Howie, he is a suburban wildcat, recruited into a revenge plot against the Rookie. He narrates the story’s best comic set pieces, including a tearaway van that skids crazily through the city. The revelation is the shift of focus to more intimate thoughts, such as being turned down by a woman in a bar, and the slow staggering through confusion, the rejection ready to explode. 

Even some of the fight scenes, such as a breakneck chase down an alleyway, have an unrushed, darker attention to detail. It’s one thing to race with the music of O’Rowe’s play, to be caught up in the sweep of an epic poem, but here it is deliberately grounded, and not just because of the limits of live theatre during lockdown. The telling feels urgent, as if Dublin were still on the brink. 


Runs until Jun 10th. See thelockinn.io/howie