Arts Week with Judy Murphy

‘’Acting is my be all and end all. Hurling gives me a breath of fresh air,” says Cathal Ryan, whose hit one-man comedy show, Pucked, is coming to the city’s Town Hall Theatre next Tuesday, February 4.  As a young lad, Cathal Ryan played at every level with his local hurling club, Drom & Inch – also  the home club of Tipperary legend Séamus Callanan, who won three senior All-Ireland medals with Tipp.

Cathal wasn’t in that league though. He was, he says, a reasonable hurler, but would never have been good enough to play at county level. Anyhow, any ambitions he had in that direction changed when he joined the local drama group as a teenager and discovered that acting was his true passion.

But hurling is never too far away either and the result is Pucked, a fast-paced, funny, show which he wrote and performs. It previously had a sold-out run in 2022, getting rave reviews and more importantly, being “enjoyed by both GAA fans and theatre heads”.

Cathal plays 27 characters in the show, but the main one is Matthew Daly, a young lad who wants to play senior hurling for club and county, and to reach the field of dreams, Croke Park.

Then, at the age of 22, Matthew gets the county call-up and joins the senior panel.

“He thinks all his dreams have arrived, but he learns the hard way, that’s not how it works,” laughs his creator, adding that “Pucked would have been a true story, had I not found theatre, because I was never going to play for Tipperary.”

Cathal often thinks, if he hadn’t discovered theatre, he’d have had to face that reality of not being good enough.

It happens in theatre too and it’s something actors must deal with.

“What happens when Plan A is the only plan and it doesn’t work out?”

Happily, in Cathal’s case that is a rhetorical question because so far, he’s following his dreams.

After secondary school he came to NUIG, where he did a BA and then went on to win a place in the Lir Academy at Trinity, graduating from there in 2021.

Pictured: Writer and actor Cathal Ryan, a former club hurler with Tipperary’s Drom & Inch, plays 27 characters in Pucked. The main one is Matthew Daly whose dream is to play at senior level for his county.