Tadhg Hickey: 'There is definitely younger people coming to the show reflecting on their drinking'

Through comedy sketches, a memoir and a stage show, Tadhg Hickey tells Noel Baker how he has accidentally become a spokesperson for evaluating our relationship with alcohol

Comedian Tadhg Hickey, pictured at the Everyman Theatre, Cork. Picture: David Creedon

Tadhg Hickey is discussing his latest injury. 

I suppose you could say drink was involved — just not in the obvious way.

“I actually injured myself in rehearsal, I pulled muscles in my back,” the Cork comedian, actor and writer confesses. 

The rehearsal was for his new one-man, multi-character show Gatman!, an exploration of how alcohol can alter your inner perceptions of yourself, even as the rest of the universe sees you staggering around and about to fall over.

For the 41-year-old Hickey, it expands on themes he has written about in his memoir, A Portrait of the Piss Artist as a Young Man, and on his previous show, In One Eye, Out The Other. 

Directed by Sophie Motley, Gatman! unspools a day with main character, Murph, as he tries to sober up before a supervised visit with his little boy.

Running alongside this are the adventures of Gatman, a superhero who acquires extraordinary powers when fuelled by Gat — alcohol, in non-Leeside parlance. 

For Gatman the aim is save beautiful, boozy Corkopia from the tyranny of Father Mathew, with the city’s statue to the temperance champion having come to life.

Tadgh praises the team behind the show and refers to the “Kafkaesque metamorphosis” that Murph undergoes when he’s drunk, transforming from “nervy nerd into genuine superhero — and not even over a night, it’s over a can or two”. 

Given the sheer range of characters and voices required in Gatman!, he admits his latest production presented a different kind of challenge.

“The first show was more a stream of consciousness, like a lad sitting on a chair and he stands up and starts telling these stories and it’s like you’ve been caught with him on a bus, and then these tall tales all tie together at the end.

“I just threw myself into it [the new show], the physicality of doing 20 characters,” he says, adding that he “wanted there to be another way of telling the alcohol story, a theatrical extravaganza, to go to the other extreme [from his earlier work] — by the time I was halfway through I was like ‘this is a huge mistake!’”

Comedian Tadhg Hickey, pictured at the Everyman Theatre, Cork: "I just threw myself into it [the new show], the physicality of doing 20 characters," Picture: David Creedon

His concerns were unfounded and the preview shows in March went well. Things really kick off this month with a run of shows in The Everyman and the Dublin Fringe in September.

Hickey says that while some of the story departs “quite a lot” from his own experiences as a young man in the grip of alcohol, others are deeply rooted in those formative experiences.

“Junior Cert night drinking cans,” he says. “That was pivotal for me.”

As someone who is utterly candid about his own addiction to alcohol, he also feels that Murph’s character has his own ambiguities: “This guy is not a victim but he is going to tell you he is a victim, he is taking no responsibility for himself and that is why he is struck in this inertia.

“Gatman is a superhero and Fr Mathew is the prick, but as the play goes on you think hang on, is Fr Mathew the good guy? He’s trying to get Murph sober.”

Hickey adopts the one-day-at-a-time ethos of the recovering alcoholic in his own life and alongside his sketches and shows, he — in his own words — “found myself accidentally becoming an activist”.

Comedian Tadhg Hickey at the Everyman Theatre, Cork. Picture: David Creedon

To return to Gatman!, it pleased him to see people he knows, from recovery and also from the more vulnerable edges of society, in the audience back in March.

“On the second night, a bunch of young people came, they were from the Cork Life Centre,” he says.

“This was a group I had not invited, they were maybe 16, 17. One of the Everyman team was eavesdropping afterwards, not deliberately, and they were talking about their own drinking — one of them was saying he was a binge drinker, like Murph, who is a binge drinker.

“There are definitely a good few younger people coming to the show which is great, maybe reflecting on their drinking — that would be amazing, I did not set out to do that. And then there are people in recovery or on the fringes of recovery who are also coming to the shows.”

The show begins in a recovery room and Tadhg admits to some unintentional “blurred lines” where the audience may arrive with the idea that they can interact with the characters.

“Stand-up is a great training for that, you literally will get anything back from an audience — someone might try and fight you, which happened once,” Tadhg says, while adding that the ideal scenario is that no-one shouts anything back when Murphy announces as per an AA meeting ‘I’m an alcoholic’.

Tadhg believes the younger Irish of today may be adopting a different approach to alcohol. His daughter, 20, is “a good touchstone” in this regard, he says, given she and her friends have “a completely different outlook” towards alcohol.

“When I was in school [there was] a collective rush to gather money to get alcohol,” he recalls. “I had a part-time job in transition year exclusively to get money to drink at the weekend.”

He says he never subscribed to the idea of a Brendan Behan-style sozzled artist, and points out that his productivity soared once he had parked his own drinking.

“Within six months I had a sitcom on RTÉ tv,” he says. “Before that I would have meetings I wouldn’t turn up to.”

Yet he argues that you can’t replace one addiction with another — citing young people pumping iron in the gym — and he has also spoken in recent years about his own mental health struggles. 

Tadhg Hickey performing at the premiere of his new one-man show GATMAN! which runs at The Everyman, Cork from Thursday 7th-Saturday 9th March. Photo: Darragh Kane

In 2022, he told one interviewer he was “addicted to Twitter”, now X. Given the viral nature of his sketches and the plummeting standards on that platform, he realises social media is a double-edged sword.

“It is about people feeling emboldened to cross that line,” he says of trolling and general online abuse. “Say if you are disillusioned with what is going on in Irish society and you wrongly, in my opinion, blame immigrants: You have clips, they can go viral, it seems like a collective movement, so you have a small number of bad actors emboldening others to cross those lines.

“For me, it was a long process of getting hurt by it for a while, taking the comments personally.” This stopped, he says, aided by his own recovery from alcoholism — “the idea of authenticity is integral to recovery”.

“People are just putting you in boxes,” he continues. “‘Leftist, socialist, pro-Palestinian — they are fighting the box, it’s not about you. That said, it’s easy for me to say; if I was a young female politician and getting hassle, that is a different ballgame.”

He is inclined to stay on X and fight his corner, reflecting a combative edge that likely comes with the territory. As Tadhg says, he has always been “drawn to comedians who do satirical, provocative work”, people like Chris Morris, Armando Iannucci and Stewart Lee.

“These people are geniuses,” he says. However, he says he has moved from the “abstract to the personal” with the situation in Palestine, having been contacted by people connected with Palestine well before the seismic events of last Autumn.

He says he asked himself the question: “Am I a satirist who is completely aloof or satirises both sides? And I said no, I’m not, I’m happy to satirise our own hypocrites, so I became an accidental activist.”

It’s a potent mix and all quite removed from guzzling cans by the Lough in Cork City. Alongside Gatman! he has other irons in the fire.

“I am actually trying to develop something with Al Jazeera at the moment, they have been very good to me the last few months,” he says. “I’m also developing a drama/comedy based on a sketch from a year ago — basically Brexit but it’s a house share in Cork — 32 and 32a, these are the two houses.”

In the meantime, Gatman! goes on, soaring through the city of Cork and the woozy subconscious of Murph. Tadhg might just need to watch that he doesn’t put his back out again.

“I would love to do a musical,” he announces. “Something anarchic, an alternative musical, somewhere in the region of colonialism or capitalism and I would love to start casting people for that so I won’t get injuries and can’t play six a side.”

• GATMAN!, written and performed by Tadhg Hickey, returns to The Everyman from Thursday, August 29 - Friday, August 31, and Dublin Fringe Festival from Friday, September 6 - Tuesday, September 10. 
• Tickets from everymancork.com and fringefest.com