The New Directors Festival at The Granary Theatre in Cork was initiated in 2006. This year a further four directors, furnished with a small but facilitating budget, were given the opportunity to promote their directorial skills. At first glance, the selection of material seemed familiar and undaring, however each text presents the director with significant challenges.

The festival kicked off with Mark O’Rowe’s Howie The Rookie. Since Eoin Ó hAnnracháin’s production was the ice-breaker it inevitably established a standard for the festival; an accomplished opener, it raised the bar high. The monologue is a form very familiar to Irish audiences. However, oration in a theatre space is a notable challenge for even the most seasoned of actors; in lieu of a world represented on the stage, the actor’s task is to create images that are at once fantastic and credible.

O’Rowe’s visceral descriptions of the body in action make such tricky simultaneity possible. Director Eoin Ó hAnnracháin did well to cast Nick Kavanagh in the role of the Howie Lee. Kavanagh displays a physical awareness and dexterity from the word go; stalking the stage on the balls of his feet like a ravenous cougar, we feel the range and potential of his appetites. His embodiment of physical activity and restlessness successfully highlights the primeval element of O’Rowe’s portrayal of young male energy, so that alongside the urban landscape of a Dublin estate is an inner space made up of pulsating veins, white-knuckles, twitchy wrists, throbbing lungs, spittle, blood and sweat.

The depiction of the body in a hostile environment reveals Howie Lee’s vulnerability and the necessity of remaining alert, perched on the brink of violence, and at the same time magnifies the materiality of that environment, its textures, lines, temperature and moods. Together these create a sensory odyssey, a privileging of the external, and creates an exhilarating contrast to psychologically motivated drama which tend to prioritise inner states. Kavanagh’s was certainly a hard act to follow and Eoin Ó hAnnracháin prudently opts for a more insouciant pitch in his direction of Stephen McCann in the role of the Rookie Lee. In contrast to Howie Lee’s restless flexing he has adopted casualness as a subterfuge; despite the persistent smirk it is soon apparent that Rookie Lee’s nonchalance is feigned. Interestingly, this lack of verve alters the focus somewhat so that Rookie Lee’s presence and stature is much less substantial than Howie Lee’s; this is unexpected and succeeds in imbuing the second monologue with a pathos which anticipates the horrific but somewhat inexorable ending.

Fantastic and entirely credible, Ó hAnnracháin’s rendering of Howie The Rookie is a fine achievement and on its own was enough to convince me of the value of the New Directors Festival.

Irish Theatre Magazine, Volume 7, Number 33 Winter 2007