Howie the Rookie director Jerome Davis previews this new staging of Mark O’Rowe’s timeless two-hander, and tells The Theatre Playbook why this story is more relevant than ever more than 25 years after its debut.
Every two years, North Carolina-based theatre company Burning Coal visits London to bring to the stage timely revivals of overlooked and modern classics.
This week sees the company back in London to stage Howie the Rookie, a new production of Mark O’Rowe’s two-hander that was first performed in 1999.
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 described 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.
Directed by Jerome Davis, it stars Andrew Price Carlile as The Rookie and Lucius Robinson as Howie Lee.
Ahead of Howie the Rookie’s limited 10-performance run at The Cockpit Theatre, Davis speaks to The Theatre Playbook about reviving O’Rowe’s play, its modern relevance at a time of the ‘manosphere’ and the challenges of staging a two-hander production.
How did you join the project?
I’m the Artistic Director at Burning Coal and have wanted to find a way to do Howie the Rookie again after we took a crack at it 17 years ago. The timing felt right and the Cockpit Theatre, the great Dave Wybrow and his lovely team, said yes.
Were you familiar with the original 1999 production?
Yes, though I did not see it. I read the script, fell in love with it and am amazed that more people don’t do it or know it.
Why is it still relevant more than 25 years later?
Because it is truthful. The characters are real, the locations are real, the situations are real and, from those three things, worlds can be imagined. That’s what we do in the theatre: we imagine worlds and their people and then, most critically, we try to empathise with them and ask you, the audience, to empathise with them. If we don’t do that, we aren’t doing theatre, we’re doing agitprop, which bores.
What can you tell us about this new production?
It’s being staged in the round, it’s being performed by American actors, two of our best, and we are looking closely at the play to try to understand the two young men central to the action and to find within them a glimmer of maturity and grace that might otherwise be overlooked.
How do you direct a two-hander?
It’s actually two one-handers. Howie Lee, played by Lucius Robinson, tells us his story up to a point, and then The Rookie Lee (no relation), played by Andrew Price Carlile, tells the same story and continues it a bit further, Rashomon-style. Speed is our ally, as is humour and, when appropriate, silence.
How did you cast the show?
Very carefully! Actually, Lucius did it with us 17 years ago when he was much younger. Our other actor from that production had moved out of state and is a bit long in the tooth now for The Rookie, so we recast that role. Both men have charm and a sense of humour, which are qualities critical to the storytelling. You have to want them to somehow find their way out of the murk of their dreary, dead-end lives.
What kind of work do you do with Andrew Price Carlile and Lucius Robinson in prep and rehearsals?
Our dialect coach, Rebecca Bossen, has been hard at work trying to wean them away from the more well-known (in the US) rural Ireland tones and towards the inner-city Dublin accents. I have worked on identifying what happens and where it happens. The audience is taken on a wild ride through some extraordinary locations around the city of Dublin and, in order for them to create those locales in their mind’s eye, we first have to be able to clarify them for ourselves.
Have there been any challenges bringing the show to the stage?
Doing one-man shows in the round is a challenge because your back is always to somebody, so we’ve been working on playing the corners more and also on clarity of text. O’Rowe’s language wants to fly off the tongue, which is its strength, but it also must be heard. If we can put those two things into the same package, we’ll have a real gift of a play for our audiences.
What can audiences expect?
A head-spinning race, exhilarating language and unexpected grace.
What’s next for you and Burning Coal?
I just directed My Fair Lady, which has completely sold out its run. Our 30th anniversary season looms.
Howie The Rookie will be at The Cockpit Theatre for a limited 10-performance from April 24 – May 2, 2026. Tickets here.
Top image: Andrew & Lucius as Rookie and Howie Lee in Howie the Rookie (image supplied)