Written by  Éimi Quinn

Directed by Maureen Carr

Tickets from £16.00

There are few things more appropriately Scottish than baring down something like cancer or the prospect of an early death, than with little more than a smirk, pals, and plans for one last grand adventure. Taken from actor and writer Éimi Quinn’s experiences as a teen cancer survivor, with a defiantly gallus command of wit, their debut production, The Funeral Club, is a tightly crafted play which leans as richly into gallows and black humour as it does the devastatingly stirring moments of life (and death).

It’s just another funeral for the gang. A concept usually reserved for characters in the later years of life, but here, Callum, Jade, and Emma are young patients who have met in a teen Cancer ward – finding a family within the unit, a much-needed stability in a world which feels tainted and ever-shifting. But it certainly isn’t stopping Callum from making plans for a future with only one testicle; catapulting their obsession with musical theatre out into the audience is Kyle Gardiner’s endearing performance, brimming with energy and kindred spirit, but that exhaustion underneath the front. While Caroline McKeown’s Jade brings in a poignant and, at times, heartbreaking performance as the daughter of a wealthy (if absent) father, whom the trio decides isn’t worthy of his collection of diamonds – setting off on a grand larceny crime adventure to put that money to better use.

It’s primarily in aid of Emma, who took to racking up the credit card under the assumption they were on borrowed time, and rather annoyingly, they seem to be hanging around. And debt has a nasty habit of outliving everything else. Quinn’s writing and performance are exceptional in an encompassing honesty; jokes are played for their authenticity, as well as their crowbarred reality-check for those in the audience without a first-hand experience with the subject matter: early menopause and surgery, stoma bags, medical exhaustion and crutches. You don’t see the condition – hell – audiences don’t even really see a character. What Maureen Carr’s animated and crucial direction achieves in magnifying Quinn’s writing is to push audiences to see the people. Everyday ones, living through the same stories. Though with less purloining, hopefully.

For an initial outing as a playwright, Quinn’s The Funeral Club couldn’t have asked for a more receptive crowd at Òran Mór, where tears and laughter shared a few pints and pies on equal footing in a touching fifty-five minutes of theatrical camaraderie. Appropriately, almost too so, the only enemy of the production is time. The brass-eloquence of Quinn’s script can occasionally be lost in the pacing of a Play, Pie, and Pint’s limited running time and the momentum of the top-quality comedy, but the most magnificent thing about The Funeral Club is how beautifully apparent the future is here: for the characters and story yes; more so for the play itself; and a marvellously bright one for Quinn as performer and playwright.

In a season which has taken chances in commissioning and content, The Funeral Club finds itself one of the most successfully entertaining while also striding boldly forward as one of the most accomplished, the writing able to navigate the twist revelations as deftly as it can secure a poignantly heartfelt core of sincerity, guilt, therapy, and dogging with a perfectly balanced sense of authenticity with a trio of stellar performances. All of whom locate outright hilarity in the face of the darkest moments: this is life-affirming theatre, with enough cut of the grim to keep your senses sharp and your outlook humbled.

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