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Irish charm carries off gritty Dublin drama
HOWIE THE ROOKIE
Old Red Lion
Tiptoeing round the bodies on the floor, through the foreboding Irish mist, you know you’re in for a tragic tale from the moment you enter the Old Red Lion Theatre.
Howie The Rookie takes the form of two monologues, delivered by a pair of Dublin lads, Howie Lee (Johnny Vivash) and Rookie Lee (Kieran Gough). Each tells their gritty story, introducing their friends, family and foes along the way, indicated by the presence of the silent other, but voiced by the storyteller. They pepper their prose with Dublin street-slang, giving their slick slices of suburban life a lyrical, if sometimes incomprehensible, quality.
From picking up girls to picking fights, catching scabies to catching buses; scenes and characters are rapidly switched between; a sort of Stones in his Pockets meets Shameless.
Mark O’Rowe’s script calls for plenty of Irish charm, to carry off the crude and raw narrative, but both actors deliver.
Vivash provides a stocky, streetwise storyteller for the first half, with his frank, yet funny, encounters. He tries to resist Avalanche, a girl with “arse enough for three stools” whose unstoppable advances match her name.
Accustomed to their lingo by the second half, there’s only a slight loss of momentum as the audience adjusts to Gough, as the new, more vulnerable, wiry narrator.
An industrial, tension-building soundtrack, along with sharp staging and lighting, ensures this production flies along at a white-knuckle pace. It raised me up with its humour one minute and pulled me down with its pathos the next, all the while hanging on tight as we hurtled through their domestic, urban and criminal worlds. When it stopped, I was both relieved it was over and desperate to feel the thrill of it again.
Until April 4
020 7837 7816 |
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