Cancer and comedy: Emma Lange returns to the stage with a winning cocktail

Emma Lange was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2016. Eight years later, she returns to the stage with a new show, An Almighty Yes.

Michele A’Court calls her the “funniest person she’s ever met”. Justine Smith says that “we’re all choo-choo trains” on the track she laid down. She has toured with the Topp Twins and even been Lynda Topp’s stunt double. Her name is Emma Lange, and she’s back.

Lange was a fixture of the Classic in the early 00s, in the wake of Pulp Comedy, but she stopped writing comedy to do other jobs, including working in radio, rockhopping her way through life. It was in 2016, when she was a host on RadioLive, that she was diagnosed with what she calls “dirty old brain cancer”.

The tumour was large, malignant, and incurable. Not great, as tumours go.

“They put you on the bell curve of death and I had a very dreary prognosis,” Lange says. She had a moment of realisation, though:

“If I am due to peg out, so they say, what do I want to do?”

Over the years, since leaving comedy and since her diagnosis, she felt like she had lost her voice. She’d lost self-confidence, and self-worth. That triggered a thought: she was going to write a solo show, and she was going to tour it.

The first season of An Almighty Yes played at Basement Theatre in November. It returns this week to BATs Theatre in Wellington as part of the New Zealand Fringe Festival, before going to the New Athenaeum Theatre in Dunedin, in a developed, more mature form. When she was writing the show, cancer, perhaps not so obviously, was the most ready source of comedy.

“Lots goes on when you have cancer, and lots of it is not fun,” she observes. “I felt like I was far enough along and away from it to find oblique angles in it.”

“Everybody has a terrible time sometimes, and it’s actually really funny.”

Making the show the first time around was difficult for Lange. She had lost confidence, which is not uncommon amongst creatives, especially in comedy. Standing in front of paid audience, asking to be laughed at, and potentially not getting those laughs, is not what any mental health professional would recommend to build confidence. “My reason for doing it was in the hope that I would hear myself again, that I would find myself again, and trust in my own talent, my own self.”

“But it’s still really hard and challenging and unenjoyable and not that fun,” she says. “And I think it’s a long way to go for me to reclaim my voice and hear myself again purely because I have not done it for such a long time.”

Coupled with that, it was the first time she’d tested her brain. As part of her treatment, she underwent a very large craniotomy, which was especially taxing given that her tumour was in the communication part of her brain. “I’m a born communicator, I love connecting, sharing, expressing – and it was right there in my most precious part.”

“I feel like I’m sort of a different person in a mild way, but I’m still working out in what way and to what extent.”

Despite her cancer being one of the impetuses for the show, and a core part of the show’s comedy, Lange is resolute that she is not cancer. She decides for herself. In the process of creating this project, it’s been really good for me because I feel like cancer is just another little part of my life,” she says. 

“It’s not who I am. I’m not at all saturated by it.”

An Almighty Yes plays at BATs Theatre from February 27 – March 2 as part of New Zealand Fringe Festival, and at the New Athenaeum Theatre from March 14 – 16.

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