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Posts tagged ‘Mark O’Rowe’

Dec 13

★★★★★ Review – Time Out, New York

Howie the Rookie: In brief
Tom Vaughan-Lawlor plays both roles in a reconceived version of writer-director Mark O’Rowe’s brutal Dublin drama, which first rocked New York in 2001.

Howie the Rookie: Theater review by Helen Shaw

Mark O’Rowe’s Howie the Rookie has already had two New York productions, a tour in 2001 and a local production in 2005. Now it is back, in a startlingly beautiful one-man version that seems written for its new star, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, perhaps because O’Rowe himself has taken on directing duties. And if producers want to bring Howie back four years from now, then ten, then twelve, we’ll still greet the gorgeous thing with huzzahs: O’Rowe’s hilarious, pimp-rollin’, blood-soaked text has Shakespeare’s interiority, Marlowe’s viciousness and a cowboy’s jangling gait; it’s got Joyce’s sense of place, Faulkner’s sense of language and even a sprinkling of murderously timed fart jokes. Read more

Dec 12

Review – The New York Times

Harsh Tongues, Marinated in Whiskey
‘Howie the Rookie,’ in BAM’s Next Wave Festival

Of arms and the man, they sing. Well, men. And also scabies, microwave lasagna, Mayan legends, Siamese fighting fish and a flatulent hussy named Avalanche. In Mark O’Rowe’s word-drunk and whiskey-soaked 1999 play, “Howie the Rookie,” two young Dublin louts — one named “The Howie Lee,” one named “The Rookie Lee” — deliver rowdy monologues.

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Nov 25

Review – Financial Times

The 1990s in theatre meant more than “in-yer-face” plays. At the same time as British drama was growing graphic and biological, a crop of Irish playwrights were breathing new life into the monologue form. Conor McPherson and Enda Walsh are the best known, but in 1999 Mark O’Rowe’s Howie the Rookie almost bridged the gap between the monologue and in-yer-face currents.

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Nov 21

★★★★ Review – Time Out

Howie Lee and Rookie Lee – no relation – share a surname and a city, Dublin. In Mark O’Rowe’s revival of his own cult classic, both men are played by a single actor, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, and they seem to share much more besides: a Neanderthal gait, empty eyes and a slack-jawed drawl. It’s like they were destined to meet in fateful circumstances.

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Nov 21

★★★★ Review – Evening Standard

Mark O’Rowe has smoothly transformed a two-hander into a one-man show and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, who plays both Howie and the Rookie, revels in its ripe language

Mark O’Rowe’s vibrant, scabrous, picaresque tour of the seedy side of life in Dublin announced the Irish writer as a talent to be reckoned with when it premiered at the Bush Theatre in 1999. O’Rowe himself directs this production, the first major London revival, and has now smoothly transformed a two-hander into a one-man show.

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Nov 12

Mark O’Rowe in the Irish World

Mark O’Rowe speaks to David Hennessy about Howie The Rookie in The Irish World ahead of performances at The Barbican in London.

Click here to read the full article.

Nov 3

Mark O’Rowe and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor in the Irish Independent

Tom Vaughan-Lawlor and Mark O’Rowe interview each other in the Irish Independent on 1st Nov 2014.

Click here to read the whole article

Oct 27

Mark O’Rowe and Tom Vaughan Lawlor – Sunday Business Post

Nadine O’Regan chats to Mark O’Rowe and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor ahead of the return of Howie the Rookie. 

Read the full article here.  26th October 2014 Sunday Business Post

Oct 7

Tom Vaughan-Lawlor: Nidgey, Howie, PJ and me

The actor is back on TV tomorrow in series five of ‘Love/Hate’. But the punctual, theatre-loving, Donna Tartt-reading actor has little in common with his character

It is curtain call at the end of the first preview of Mark O’Rowe’s emotionally bruising new play, Our Few and Evil Days, at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and the audience are on their feet. On stage, five actors, among them Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, take their bows. Looking out into the auditorium, the cast seem tentative, grateful, humbled by the warmth from the audience, that previously unknowable but essential piece of the jigsaw of theatre.

“I love previews, as an actor or in the audience,” Vaughan-Lawlor says the following morning. “There is that sense that anything can happen.”

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Mar 26

Howie the Rookie to play at Barbican, London

Landmark Productions is delighted to announce that Howie the Rookie, starring Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, will play at the Barbican in London.
The production will play for one week only at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin from 11 – 15 November, before transferring to the Barbican in London from 19 – 29 November, with a press night on Thursday 20 November 2014.

Mark O’Rowe, who not only wrote but also directed the award-winning production of his play Howie the Rookie, said: ‘Working with Tom Vaughan-Lawlor has been an absolute high point in my theatrical life, and so I am thrilled beyond belief that audiences both in Dublin and London are going to have another opportunity to see his astonishing performance in Howie the Rookie.’

Howie the Rookie is part of the Barbican’s ‘bold programme of new theatre and daring adaptations from around the globe’, including productions from Irina Brook from France, Thomas Ostermeier from Germany and Dmitry Krymov from Russia. The season also includes Gregory Doran’s productions for the RSC of Henry IV Parts I and II, starring Antony Sher and Jasper Britton, as well as an eagerly-anticipated new production of Hamlet, with Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role.

www.barbican.org.uk

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