Guest Blog: Artistic Director of The Cockpit, Dave Wybrow, on Why HOWIE THE ROOKIE Feels More Urgent Than Ever

The Cockpit Theatre is preparing to stage a limited 10-performance run of Mark O’Rowe’s ferocious and timeless two-hander, Howie The Rookie.

Structured as two interlocking monologues delivered sequentially, the play follows Howie Lee and The Rookie Lee across a single volatile 24-hour period in a tough locale within suburban Dublin. Fast-paced and foul-mouthed, the play examines how some young men at the extremes of society perform toughness, dominance and emotional detachment as social currency and how quickly wounded pride can tip into violence. Here Artistic Director of The Cockpit Theatre, Dave Wybrow, explains how this brutal play still speaks to a divided world.

Howie needs an arena. The good thing about a class system is that we all have someone to look down on. Unless, that is, you are at the bottom.

We are staging Howie in the round because it offers special possibilities: people can see each other’s faces, which gives actors the chance to play to different sections of the audience for others to witness. The play is oration, and the Cockpit is two amphitheatres joined together. But it is also conflict and the Cockpit’s alter ego is an arena.

Howie feels relevant despite what it is not about, which is nothing particularly current. It was written at the height of the Celtic Tiger, when Ireland was on the rise: before the spectre of narrowcasting on social media came to haunt our assumptions about stable democracy, and before globalisation had generated a mass class of the “left behind.”

It is also not about “the working class.”

Nor is it about “men.”

The typologies unleashed in the play are not general stereotypes. “Working-class Dublin,” whatever that means, is not about drunks fighting, it is about people working. Most men are not addicted to a lifestyle of performative violence. (No, really, they are not. Take a look at them on the tube.)

The play is first and foremost about particular people in a particular locale. About characters at the extremes of society. Only after that is it any kind of political critique. It appeared at a time when globalisation was lifting the Irish economy, with property prices heading through the roof. But some areas - in this case hard, micro-locales within suburban Dublin - never saw that. This is about an unvisited Dublin. It was there before the Celtic Tiger. It was there in 1999.

It is there now.

It is this that makes the play such an affront to middle-class sensibilities that can loftily reference pockets of social and economic deprivation without mentioning the concomitant human depravity they imply.

Howie The Rookie is a hard but deeply rewarding watch because it is about people, not theory.

Which people?

Well, you know them. The family down the road where the old man is in and out of prison, the mother refuses to pay bills and abuses visitors from social services, where there are too many bruised daughters and snarling sons - but also flashes of unaccountable wealth: no one works, but there is no shortage of Stone Island tees.

This is not working-class Dublin. It is the roughest enclaves of the roughest locales and estates within suburban Dublin; headbanger society and the people you will see in A&E even on a Monday night. Crack, not craic.

They defy socio-political analysis and neat sociological theory. They were there before globalisation left de-industrialised areas behind, and before social media gave rise to digital cultures of resentment and alienation, and they will probably be there long after those objectifying, worrying concepts have worn out their relevance.

The play is anti-divisive at a time when political division risks morphing into sectarian vilification. Who the hell could ever vote for Trump? For Farage? we wonder, horrified. Who the hell would sanction illegal migrants taking our homes? Our health services? we complain in fury.

We live in a society that wilfully creates winners and losers. Recently, huge winners and huge losers. In this context, unassailable antagonism can arise. Is arising.

We are doing the play because it enables us to learn something from people who do unassailable antagonism for a living, as a way of life.

As Jerome Davis, the show’s director, says: seeing these two young men squander their potential and wreck the lives of the people closest to them is tragic and might seem meaningless, but O’Rowe’s comedy manages to elicit that rarest human emotion: true empathy across a divide.

Through all their bluster, their anger, their hatefulness, somehow he finds in each of them something recognisable and true. That self-recognition is painful, but it reminds us that we are in charge of our own destinies, the masters of our own fates, and when, finally, one of the two stands up for the first time, perhaps in his life, not selfishly but selflessly, it is glorious.

The purpose of staging Howie now is to remember that those we are scared of are, generally, merely human - not monstrous. It is a mistake to let them convince us otherwise.