The muck of the Irish

By LINDA HERRICK

Actor Eryn Wilson wanders into the scout hall that's doubling as rehearsal space, his nice suit looking a little rumpled and stained.

He's just been outside rolling around on the grass, roughing it up for his role as The Rookie Lee in Irish playwright Mark O'Rowe's award-winning Howie the Rookie.

The Rookie Lee may fancy himself as a smoothie but he gets a beating in the play which means Wilson must sacrifice the suit. "It's funny when you roll around on the ground. People were giving me strange looks but no one said anything," he muses.

Which is just the opposite in Howie the Rookie, an unusually constructed work in which two actors - in this case Wilson and Scott Wills - each have a mind-boggling block of monologue as they inch towards the strange and shattering climax.

Wills is up first as The Howie Lee, then Wilson as The Rookie Lee, but each also recounts the dialogue of numerous other Dubliners, male and female, old and young.

These are small lives in a horizonless environment ruled by petty hostilities and problems addressed by violence rather than logic. By the end, loyalty and responsibility - or the lack thereof - are the real issues.

The "torrent of words", as Wills sees it, presents a staggering challenge for the actors, agrees director Chris Mead, who has come from Sydney's Company B Belvoir St Theatre to work with the pair, with whom he also teamed for Trainspotting - the Play in 1999.

"It's a virtuoso actors' piece," he says. "It's one actor at a time alone with the audience and you can't get more real for an actor than that. It's a block of text and you can do anything you want with it. There are no stage directions. There's a production that's coming to Sydney that is very physical and they take a lot of things literally. With this production we are trying to reflect the modesty of the text with simplicity in the staging. We are reducing theatre to its basic elements: somebody telling a story."

At times a very rude story it is too, delivered in Dublin Oirish which the actors must avoid caricaturing. To help them avoid leprechaun Irish and hit the right northern accent of Dublin, producer Emily Mowbray hauled in some Dubliners working in an Auckland pub to listen to the dialogue.

"I was watching them trying not to laugh," says Mead.

"They were saying, 'Oh, dat's very Dublin, oh, dat's so Dublin', meaning the attitudes towards sex and the appalling behaviour. It gave us such heart that it meant something to them."

Mead believes Mark O'Rowe is "a very clever boy", a view reflected by the play winning the Irish Times Play of the Year Award, the Rooney Award for Irish Literature and the George Devine Award for Best New Play.

"It's similar to Trainspotting in that it's about a bunch of working class boys trying to make sense of their lives but I think O'Rowe has a greater reach and depth. When you really start looking at it, you pick up clues. He has buried a lot of stuff in there, like a reference to [film-maker] John Woo's Last Hurrah for Chivalry, which if you look it up, is about friendship, honour, betrayal and redemption. He talks about seeing Matt Dillon at a party and I couldn't work out why. Then we realised it was a reference to Rumblefish and the same type of themes. This play is like an onion. On the surface it's an engaging story about boys scrapping but the more you study it, you see what a strong piece of literature it is - without having a scholastic stink."

* Howie the Rookie, SiLo Theatre, Wednesday-February 22; Circa Studio, Wellington, March 3-7, 14-22.