Howie the Rookie at The SiLo

By FRANCIS TILL

The SiLo has jump-started its new season, Naughty, with an energetic and compelling offer from Ireland's Mark O'Rowe, Howie the Rookie.

Directed by Sydney Company B resident Chris Mead, the play features two actors and two sequential monologues in the telling of a convoluted story that stretches over only a few hours in time but most of Dublin's underbelly.

The text is reputedly provided to the company without stage directions, forcing actors to create the characters whole.

These two actors - and their director - do a fine job of that, generating two extremely memorable men and keeping a complex story fairly zipping along.

Rookie (Scott Wills) and Howie (Eryn Wilson) share a last name, Lee, which is close to all the metaphor you're going to get in this fierce, funny and ultimately tragic two-hander.

Wills and Wilson inhabit their characters beautifully, giving them full flesh as they reach through the fourth wall to speak with us directly - and making their difficult personalities and sometimes dumbfoundingly wrong-headed actions seem comprehensible, even necessary for the time and place.

The text itself is rich with nuance and lends itself wonderfully to the spoken rendition - at least, in these voices. Some odd fragments are lost here and there to the use of well-coached Dublin working class accents, but the story emerges intact and perhaps better for the rhythms that come with the special sound of the Dublin throat.

The set is minimalistic, as always at the SiLo, and, even more than usual, works well for the play. There is, I have to confess, one more large metaphor at work through the set - but putting it on this page would give too much away.

One last metaphor in a play that has so few they all stand out like diamonds: smoke. Both Howie and Rookie enter from blackness through the lighting of cigarettes and both notice the smoke. Much of what happens here is as complex, transitory and beautiful as the clouds that swirl from their cigarettes - and all of it is just as toxic.