Ten years of Howie the Rookie in production
Sunday, November 16th, 2008
One of the fringe benefits of my job as a translator is to see a play in a number of often completely different productions. After all, the quality of a text is defined by the variety of solutions it makes possible whilst still staying true to it. This was strikingly the case with Mark O’Rowe’s Howie the Rookie. It consists of two monologues by Howie and Rookie Lee (no relation) giving their version of two turbulent nights out in Dublin and mentioning a whole gallery of colourful other characters who do not appear on stage themselves. In Mike Bradwell’s world première at the Bush Theatre in 1999 the two actors could have walked in straight from Goldhawk Road. They spoke in a strong dialect, Aidan Kelly’s Howie letting Benedict Nightingale claim in The Times that he “made hard-man Geordie sound like BBC English”. Bradwell resolutely concentrated on the text, the actors mainly placed against a wall. This kind of self-restriction was alright, but the most astonishing series of Howie-productions occurred in the German-speaking theatre. After the first one in Düsseldorf the piece was shown in a number of other cities and sometimes attracted unusual audiences. The Hamburg première of Howie the Rookie in the Thalia in der Kunsthalle was attended by mainly expensively dressed young people. Christian Schlüter’s version treated the text as pure stand-up comedy, which worked but let the characters appear as Irish half-wits. In front of the Hamburg jeunesse dorée this flippancy left a particularly bad taste. The director apparently had told his actors: “Here you’ve got a hundred marks, now go to H&M and buy the most tasteless gear you can find.” The two boys were made figures of fun from the start, as the actors begged for cheap laughs with Dirk Ossig’s Rookie Lee being the worse culprit copiously massaging his crotch in case anyone was stupid enough not to recognise his sexual prowess. Later performances took place in front of less posh audiences or even on tour in other theatres, for example the Freie Kammerspiele Magdeburg whose fan-base couldn’t be further from Hanseatic latter day-Sloanes.
Similarly mixed were the spectators at Düsseldorf where the production was done in the theatre’s underground car park as a late night show and older bourgeois subscribers sat next to young people from the city’s alternative scene. Director Patrick Schlösser’s interpretation was very different from Schlüter’s attempts at cabaret. In Düsseldorf the play achieved a sombre existentialist quality and you were touched by the stories the characters told. Particularly Jost Grix as Howie Lee had a disturbing kind of power. He ran round the huge building of the Schauspielhaus before every performance and took the energy thereby created onto the stage. The design consisted only of a bench stage right, a washbasin on the back wall and to the left some lockers familiar from changing rooms. It was a very intelligent solution because it rendered impossible any kind of 1:1-illustration of the events recalled: “I tell you how I walked through Dublin at night, therefore I walk up and down the stage for a while.” None of the following productions completely avoided this trap, most extremely the one by a Wuppertal fringe group incorporating per video the rich array of supporting figures only mentioned by O’Rowe. In Düsseldorf on the other hand a magical moment was not in the text at all and concerned the change from one actor to the other. The performance space was covered in thick smoke, one heard Gloria Gaynor’s “I will survive”, Howie Lee miming to run on the spot seemed to be sucked up by the fog whilst Rookie Lee had arrived via an elevator at the back of the stage and almost imperceptibly took over from his colleague.
At the Theater in der Drachengasse in Vienna director Georg Staudacher split up the two monologues of Howie the Rookie and had both actors on stage for the whole time. The audience sat on two scaffolds opposite each other. This had the unfortunate effect that you couldn’t concentrate properly, because even the smallest action by the actor not speaking at the moment distracted from his partner’s text. It was unnecessary, too, that the two of them did the last fifteen minutes in the nude. With Rookie Lee applying an anti-scabies paste to himself this was half-way plausible, with Howie Lee not at all. Nevertheless the evening had the raw power of O’Rowe’s original missing in Hamburg. In Dresden, Mannheim and Aalen a single actor delivered both monologues to demonstrate the possible secret identity of the two characters only hinted at in Vienna. At Eisenach two actors performed simultaneously in two rooms with the audience swapping seats after the interval. In 2006 the Prinzregentheater in Bochum came up with an ingenious solution for three actors. Director Orazio Zambelletti allocated the bulk of Howie’s and Rookie’s text to a specific actor. Both remained on stage while the other spoke and together with their third colleague delivered text from characters only quoted by the two main narrators. And the Theater Heilbronn in 2008 was the first to introduce a woman as a partner for the two men. All those ideas were perfectly compatible with the existing material, even though Mark O’Rowe hardly expected it to be done by one actor, let alone three of them, or with a non-sequential text and certainly not by naked young Austrians. But if proof were needed for the many facets his play contains, the German theatre in this case appeared more inventive than its British and Irish counterparts. Every time I thought the possibilities of the text finally formally exhausted a director came up with another unexpected solution. Therefore even ten years after the British and German premières Mark O’Rowe’s text may still not have run its course. Anyone for an all female version highlighting the characters’ macho bravado?
