Pacifist's Guide to the War on Cancer at the Canberra Theatre

"It wiped his little brain," she says. "All his development, everything he had learned, gone. It was like he was a newborn again."

If her son's illness wasn't enough, she was also diagnosed with anxiety and her relationship with Frank's father, Tim Grayburn, with whom she had collaborated to produce 2015's Fake It Till You Make It, broke down.

"F*** me, what a year," she says.

Suddenly cancer became something of a chirpy subject to be writing about.

Kimmings had been approached by Complicite theatre company to write a play for "the next generation". Producer Judith Dimant had been working with the company, one which actor Emma Thompson once described as the "most trailblazing in our theatrical history", for more than two decades. She had also been recently diagnosed with breast cancer.

"I was working with Judith and she was coming in with this bald head and I just asked her up front if she had cancer," Kimmings says.

"And she said yes, but I'm a fighter, I'm going to beat it … I became very intrigued by the metaphorical war language around cancer and where it came from and why we use it and whether it's helpful."

Kimmings spent months interviewing other cancer patients, attending treatments, following people around asking lots of "brutally honest questions".

"We're very protective of people with cancer and for a lot of people that's not particularly helpful, saying you can do this, you can beat it.

"People want to say I shit myself three times today but I can't because you just want me to smile and say I'm okay.

"The ways we deal with cancer are mostly invented by people who aren't sick, to make people who aren't sick feel okay.

"If you actually ask a cancer patient what they'd like to talk about, how they'd like you to talk to them, it's not how people do it."

A Pacifist's Guide to the War on Cancer doesn't muck about. Essentially it's a story about death. Give or take the occasional tap-dancing tumour. At the end of the play the audience is given the chance to stand up and speak out loud about how cancer has affected their own lives. People cry and Kimmings loves that.

It's about bringing two worlds together - "the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick", a concept she borrowed from Susan Sontag and her book Illness as a Metaphor. They're two very different places, she says.

"When Frank got sick it was all very surreal. I suddenly went from one kingdom to the other.

"I was like I've been trying to write this guide to cancer, asking all these poorly people to give me their points but actually once you're in there, in the kingdom of the sick, there is no f**king guide and you're hurtling towards who knows what."

What got her through this period, ironically, were the cancer sufferers she'd been interviewing for the play.

"They were the people who saved me, they knew I needed to howl into a pillow for three days, they bought me food, lots of brilliant things, but other people, my friends in the kingdom of the well, they didn't know what to do."

Kimmings has never shied away from taboo topics. Nor telling her own stories. In Sex Idiot she tracked down ex-boyfriends after discovering she had chlamydia (and the audience was asked to clip their own pubic hair); in 7 Day Drunk she spent a week intoxicated to see if would improve her creativity; in Fake It Till You Make It, she and Grayburn discussed his depression. She'd never, however, had any personal experience with cancer.

Working with Brian Lobel and Tom Parkinson, they came up with this narrative of someone who is trying to write a guide to cancer, and then her child gets sick, and she's thinking why don't we know about illness until we have it.

In the original version of the play they worked with real cancer patients. One had had cancer seven times, another had bowel cancer and was angry that it "wasn't sexy" like breast cancer, one young man was in denial about his lymphoma and continued to party, another had late stage terminal ovarian cancer. They all took to the stage.

The version coming to Canberra is scaled down but still as powerful.

Kimmings performs with one of the original cast members, Lara Veitch, who, she says, "has become one of her best friends".

"It's just two ordinary people on the stage," Kimmings says. "It's a very raw conversation."

But these, she says, are exactly the kind of conversations we should be having about cancer.

But how do you do that and incorporate song and dance?

"In this version it's kind of overt, I've simplified everything, I'm in it, Lara's in it and we're telling the story of what happened.

"And then we'll go 'So I wrote her a song', she asks for a country number, so here's the song she needed to process all the shit things that happened to her body that week.

"It's not like a musical that goes scene, scene, liftoff, character development … it's more let's rock out about poo.

"In musicals songs process something that's bigger than being able to talk about it. When you're dealing with cancer that's very helpful. You can't just sit and moan about poo but if you sing about it, you can say the things you couldn't say if you were just moaning."

Kimmings admits that sometimes the audience will be taken to dark corners, "but ultimately it's uplifting".

"People leave and go, f**king hell that was intense, but isn't it actually better to say I'm really scared and then people go me too, me too, it's so lovely to be able to be honest rather than hold it all in."

Frank is now two. There's been some difficulties with his development and learning, Kimmings says.

"I really don't know what's in store.

"I just know whatever happens in Frank's life he will always be grinning and making the best of it."

That's all you can do.

Canberra Theatre Centre presents Complicite in collaboration with the National Theatre, A Pacifist's Guide to the War on Cancer, from February 28-March 3.

At the Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, from March 7-8 and Seymour Centre, Sydney, from March 22-29.

1. Try not to say ' What can I do?' or 'How can I help?' Those are too open-ended and it's too easy to reply, 'Don't worry, I'm fine.' What you can say is: 'I'm coming over and I'm going to make dinner and I'm going to clean your kitchen, is that OK?'

2. Understand that the person who is ill is going to react in unexpected ways. Be supportive and understand, please, that sometimes, your support might be thrown in your face. Don't be put off by different and varying reactions. Know that the person sometimes feels irrational and totally mad.

3. Cards with lots of writing and stories and things relating to you are lovely to receive and mean a lot. Cards with just a few words and a generic greeting are weird.

4. Post-surgery food: ask the person what they want to eat before you come. When I'm well I can eat all the chocolate in the world but after surgery all I wanted was melon. So just ask.

5. I personally like to go to all my appointments alone, it's just easier for me, but it's always nice to have the offer of a companion and to feel like you have that option if you want it. But you should never be forced to take people along. Friends keeping track of appointments means a lot to the person who is ill and a text in the morning to say good luck, or a phone call later on to see how it went, is always appreciated.

6. People on chemo often feel very sick. When visiting please don't douse yourself in perfume. Or bring smelly food or candles, unless on request. It could be the most delicious fragrance in the world to you but strong smells of nearly any kind turned my stomach.

7. Please just stay present and there. Don't disappear. Don't be scared of saying the wrong thing. It's so much better to be a friend and be accidentally insensitive than just to not be there at all.

Lara Veitch is a collaborator on A Pacifist's Guide to the War on Cancer. She has Li Fraumeni Syndrome, a rare inherited genetic predisposition towards cancer.