ÉIMI Quinn’s reaction to the news when told she had stage-three cancer reveals the woman’s character in a single sentence. “I thought f*** it,” she recalls, grinning. “I’m not going to die with the words ‘business studies graduate’ in my obituary. No, it’s going to say Éimi Quinn – Actor.’”

Quinn, did indeed become an actor, having leapt from business to theatre studies (her performance as Cecily Cardew in last season’s Bard in the Botanic’s staging of The Importance of Being Ernest, replete with natural Springburn accent, was hilarious). But more recently she has become a playwright, having written her first play The Funeral Club, based on her own battle with cancer.

The then 19-year-old had to endure not only horrific chemo treatments but watching cancer-sufferer ward friends die around her. Yet, incredibly, Quinn explains she was able to have as much fun during the period as was humanly possible.

Was it part of the human spirit’s coping mechanism? “Oh, aye,” she says, grinning. “For example, when in hospital we’d go to as many of the funerals of those in our friendship group as we could. We called ourselves The Funeral Club. I know it’s a weird dichotomy to laugh when so upset but at the Beatson, where I was treated, we were encouraged to find the fun.”

She adds; “For example, we went to one funeral, and it was running later, so the auntie of the deceased decided to play the playlist from his phone. And the first song the shuffle produced was Now You’re Gone, by Basshunter, which was so inappropriate in every way. But the Funeral Club all burst out laughing.

“Then, when the coffin arrived, we discovered it was a big Rangers supporting family because it was rhino-wrapped with a Union Jack. Just then my pal chipped in ‘F*** me, is Geri Halliwell deid?’ and again the wild laughter broke out, which never really subsided. It was the funniest day.”

Even the cancer ward offered up relief in an unexpected form. “You can’t believe the shenanigans we got up to. Teenagers are by nature quite hedonistic, but when you’re told you may die, then you don’t really give a s*** about the consequences. One friend, while in hospital, picked up chlamydia from her boyfriend, also suffering from cancer, who’d picked it up from another patient.”

Eimi Quinn’s stage-three cancer meant she was constantly on the edge of life and death. “I’d be in and out of hospital all the time, and when out I went mental with the credit card debt, going on holidays, clubbing, eating out every night, buying an incredible load of sh***, clothes, figuring I’d take my debt to the grave. My thinking was if I’m going to leave this world, I’m going to go having enjoyed myself.” She laughs. “But then I didn’t die! And I thought ‘How am I ever going to pay this off?’”

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That period of mad indulgence suggested the storyline for the play, which she appears in alongside Kyle Gardiner and Caroline McKeown. Two girls from the cancer ward plan a diamond heist, to pay off their debt mountain. “Obviously that never happened in real life. But that sense of cancer sufferers laughing in the face of consequence certainly did.”

Quinn, now 31, and set to return to the Bard in the Botanics series this year, is quite an astonishing person in her ability to see sunshine where there is only darkness. But her darkest moment didn’t come about when told she had cancer (after being unwell for a year before being diagnosed).

“I sort of zoned out when I heard the news,” she recalls. “I just couldn’t take it in, and I let my dad do the thinking for me. But then he had to authorise the immediate operation. And when I woke up after surgery, the news was worse than being told I had cancer. I’d lost my ovaries and would never have children. This was now a different world from the one I went to sleep in.”

But Quinn recovered. She told her dark but funny cancer stories to the likes of actor Kyle Gardiner, director Jen Dick, Witserface’s Theatre Group’s Maureen Carr and (then) Play Pie and a Pint’s artistic director, Jemima Levick. The result is her first theatre play, and Quinn is also writing a sitcom set in a cancer ward.

She grins. “It will give me the chance to tell some great true stories. You know, at one point during treatment my friend and I went down to speak at a cancer charity in Manchester. I was speaking at 9.30am but we’d got there the night before and gone clubbing. The result was we didn’t get in ‘till 7am. And yes, I looked like death. But I just told the organisers I looked so bad because of the chemo.”

The actor/writer almost chokes on a huge laugh. “In reality, it was the sambuca.”

The Funeral Club, A Play Pie and a Pint, Oran Mor, until Saturday. The Merry Wives of Wishaw, Bard in the Botanics, July 11 – 27. 

 

Don’t Miss: The return to Rydell High and the Fifties with Grease, where Danny and Sandy break hearts and sing their own hearts out to classics. The King’s Theatre, Glasgow, June 17 – 22.