"If they indulge in the illusion of a job well done here, they'll go to the wall much faster than I can send them."

This is not the sort of review that anyone who had recently launched a new theatre company would enjoy reading, but Martin Harris was not so easily dissuaded. He would, however, be the first to admit that those early years were very challenging."We were operating like a mini rep theatre - rehearsing the next play during the day, whilst the current one played at night. I don’t know what I was thinking."

Rocket Theatre was working out of the basement of The Square Albert pub in central Manchester. Harris had persuaded Tetley’s Brewery to let him have it as a performance space, free of charge. They bought a handful of lights and some old sound equipment, with money from the Prince’s Youth Business Trust, and set up a small stage at one end of the room."We did nine plays in the first six months. We did a mixture of pretty good productions - and some real shite, but at least it got us known fairly quickly."

Harris’s attitude is refreshingly pragmatic. When he met Jim Burke (at the time a City Life critic and the author of the review above), he told him he agreed with his comments, but since the company hadn’t gone to the wall, he asked if he could make use of Burke’s creativity. Jim Burke was obviously won over by Harris’s enthusiasm: "Jim is now working on his third play for Rocket," Harris tells me, with quiet satisfaction. "The last one [Cornered] won the Manchester Evening News award for best new play."

After seven years, Rocket has found its niche and is now starting to tour nationally. Harris is currently considering a reprise of their award winning production of Jim Cartwright’s, I Licked A Slag’s Deodorant. The company receives funding and advice from North West Arts, who actively encourage Rocket to produce new and challenging work. "Our policy is to produce modern, gritty and often funny drama. Sometimes we do something that’s previously only played in London and our last production was a U.K premiere. Either way the plays won’t usually be more than five years old. Because of budget restraints, the number of actors has to be kept to a minimum and the set is pretty sparse as well. I see this as part of the challenge and it means that I need to find work that is highly imaginative and provides the audience with an intense personal experience."

Rocket’s production of Patrick Marber’s, Dealer's Choice pushed the minimal approach to its obvious conclusion, with all six actors miming the complex rituals of backroom poker games. By removing the props, Harris allowed the audience to focus on the reactions and emotions of the characters: "The actors weren’t very happy when I first told them to mime everything, but by the end, it was completely convincing. The audience were so focussed that after the show some of them were sure they’d seen a coin being tossed in the final scene - of course, there was nothing there."

Another method of giving audiences something new is to commission an entirely original play. Next year will see Jim Burke’s, Shamer go into production. The title character runs a very profitable business arranging public humiliation scenarios; deriving great pleasure executing embarrassing ‘stings’ on both public and private figures. Harris is enthusiastic about the advantages of producing commissioned work: "To have a collaboration with someone whose work you know and trust is always rewarding. It’s great to have input into a project from such an early stage, but I leave the dialogue to Jim. Jim’s dialogue is delightful; the way he has the characters playing off each other with their bits of banter is amazing. It’s also good to get his perspective on plays I’m considering staging and, although we look at plays from different perspectives, most of the time we seem to agree on what’s suitable."

It has to be said that some of Harris’s choices have caused a bit of a stir. Outraged articles appeared in the local press after his direction of a defecation scene in Anthony Neilson’s, The Censor: "One of the reviewers was so convinced by the scene that they said that the actress ‘must have amazing control of her bowels.’ Of course it wasn’t real, but I found it a great compliment as we’d obviously done our job well. In actual fact, in the context of the play, it was a very romantic scene and the complaints came from people who hadn’t even seen the play, but had just read the review. Having said that, we do grown up theatre for grown up people. We know our approach won’t appeal to everyone, but, equally, I believe that by tackling very modern and sometimes quite risqué drama, we produce work that interests a lot of people. I don’t deliberately go out to shock, and would never do anything gratuitous - we are very careful to make sure that we don’t cross that line. On the plus side, all the publicity did increase our ticket sales!"

Rocket’s current production, Howie the Rookie, looks set to be just as hard-hitting. It took two years to get the rights to the play from its original producers, London’s Bush Theatre. Written by Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe, it takes the form of two monologues. I ask him if he is nervous of the monologue as a theatre form: "Yes. It’s the sort of thing that might put me off going to the theatre. It could be argued that this type of play comes as a result of constant budget cuts and a desperation for writers to produce work that can be staged cheaply. But, I think, stories like ‘Howie’ come from a very real tradition of story telling in Ireland. Where else but the theatre can we now get the opportunity to hear them? This is high action; with the actors flinging themselves around the stage, instantly becoming different characters and then bringing us all down to earth with a bump and the stillness of tragedy. I believe we have a show here that’s very theatrical and highly entertaining."

As Martin Harris is evidently applying his usual uncompromising philosophy to Howie the Rookie, I doubt we are in for a cosy yarn around a pint of Guinness.