Keeping the show on the road

YOU invite three friends to your home for the evening. You wear your prettiest top over jeans. You dress up your living-room too, lighting candles on the coffee table. Your husband cracks open a bottle of wine and you share laughter, conversation, good food. Then, as your guests prepare to leave around 11:30pm, you stand up to say your farewells – and in an instant your life is changed forever. Your silky tunic billows out and the flame from a candle licks the floating, filmy fabric. Suddenly, you are engulfed in flames.

This is the horrific event that struck down Nancy Walsh on 18 March. The 43-year-old New York actor, director and producer threw herself to the floor while her husband, John Clancy, and their friends tried in vain to beat out the blaze. "Man, she wouldn't stop burning," says Clancy, 44, outside New York's Upper East Side Presbyterian Hospital, where Walsh was rushed, after being placed under cold water in the shower until the ambulance arrived.

He was a wreck. He'd been sitting by her bedside day and night and would do so for the month she spent undergoing two major operations, including massive skin grafts for third-degree burns on her left torso, inner left arm and shoulder.

"Thank God Nan was brought to this state-of-the-art burns centre," he says. "This is where New York's firefighters are treated, including those who survived 9/11."

Walsh was on morphine for the excruciating pain, while Clancy's hands were covered in blisters, as were those of their friends after attempting to put out the blaze. Walsh became, in her husband's words, "a f***ing Roman candle". "I just lit up like a torch," she says. "The fabric of my beautiful Indian top literally went, 'whoosh'!"

Today, after months of gruelling medical treatment, Walsh is on the road to recovery. Such is her courage and determination, however, that she will be performing at the Edinburgh International Festival, in a workshop production of Clancy's provocative new play, Captain Overlord's Folly or The Fool's Revenge("a pretentious-as-hell title!" he exclaims).

Clancy Productions NYC – the serial Fringe First-winning company run by the husband-and-wife team – won the first 10,000 EIF award last year to create a workshop presentation for Behind the Scenes, a unique initiative to give Fringe performers the funds and time to create thoughtful new work. And Walsh, who plays the "heavy" Buffo role of an evil clown, will still be on stage in Edinburgh, giving her all. "I'm a fighter; it's my cussed Irish blood," she says.

None the less, she will be scarred for life. "A burn is a dynamic," she says. "You ask, 'How long will this hurt? How long will it itch? How long will it take to heal?' The wonderful doctors I've been blessed with just say, 'It depends.'"

When she speaks of the dreadful events of the past months, she does so with wit and humour, talking of her baptism of fire. "You know, we've always liked the idea of spontaneous combustion, as in Bleak House. If you gotta go, what a great way to go," she laughs.

Walsh's reservoir of humour is apparently bottomless – she is, after all, no stranger to hospitals and life-threatening illness. In 2002, she was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour. It was a sweltering summer afternoon in New York and she was rehearsing a one-woman play, Cincinatti, for the Edinburgh Fringe. Suddenly, she had a massive seizure. A CAT scan showed a "significant mass" in her brain and a biopsy revealed the tumour was malignant. Six days later, she underwent keyhole surgery to remove 98 per cent of the growth. When she came round, she had lost all power of speech.

However, she insisted the Edinburgh show must go on – and ten days later than scheduled it did, after intensive speech and language pathology. It was, she recalls, the worst of times and – once they got to Scotland – the best of times. The Clancys left the capital with arms full of glittering prices, including two Fringe Firsts and the First of the Fringe Firsts, while Walsh won the Spirit of the Fringe award.

"I wouldn't have lived my life the way I have without my tumour, although until this stupid accident I was happier and healthier than I was before the cancer was diagnosed," she says. "I still have the cancer, but I don't spend my life thinking about it." She had radiation treatment and more than nine months of chemotherapy following the diagnosis.

She has gone on working hard, touring to London, Australia and Ireland. "John and I never stop working," she says. "We love it, of course, but as downtown, streetfighting artists, it's a constant scramble to live in this city."

Fringe veterans, they spent last August reviving their Fringe First-winning 2004 production of Fatboy, Clancy's brutally manic satire of the American way of life, in which Walsh starred. It won them the inaugural EIF award, which they regard as a great honour. "The prize money's critical for us," says Clancy.

Fatboy will be seen in Los Angeles in September and later on the island of Malta, while Clancy Productions will be at the Belfast Festival in October. At Christmas, Walsh will play Mrs Claus in a new piece by playwright Greg Kotis, author of the smash-hit musical Urinetown. "We just keep on trucking," she says cheerfully.

She insists she is no longer a brain tumour sufferer, nor a cancer victim. She's a brain tumour survivor. "A brain tumour is not a death sentence," she declares. Now she's a burns survivor, too. Nevertheless, she continues: "I feel like an ass. I mean, I've been in hospital for a brain tumour; then I set myself on fire. How dumb is that? It's ridiculous, almost pathetic. Being burnt changes your body's entire dynamic, so I'm still coming to terms with that.

"The fact that I've survived any of this, though, is down to the profound love and tireless support of my husband," she says. In fact, the past year has been one of great sadness for the couple, following three family deaths. Walsh is still grieving for her adored elder sister, Jane, who died recently of cancer.

"It's been a tough old year," agrees Clancy, who had planned to bring their most ambitious programme of work to this year's Fringe, with five new projects, including Brian Parks's play and Fringe First-winner, CJ Hopkins's America The Beautiful, in which Walsh and actor Dave Calvitto were to have appeared naked.

"We had to pull the plug on that one," she sighs. "It would have ended up being about a woman with a huge skin graft getting her kit off – and the play is not about that. I will do it, though. Next year? Sure! We'll definitely be back. I guess I'm just a phoenix, forever rising from the ashes."

Captain Overlord's Folly, or The Fool's Revenge is The Hub, today and tomorrow, 2:30pm