Interview

ERIN HOLLAND on her award-winning comedy THE QUEEN OF QUEX ROAD at Bread and Roses Theatre, Clapham 4 – 15 March


20/2/2025

Erin Holland is a writer, a performer and co-founder of theatre company The Queens of Cups. She is also the Head of Drama at a secondary school. Her comedy THE QUEEN OF QUEX ROAD won The Bread & Roses Playwriting Award 2024 and this in-house production is part of her prize. 


What is it with Erin Holland and Queens? It’s not just part of the title of her new play, ‘The Queen of Quex Road’, her theatre company is 'The Queens of Cups‘, so it’s clearly significant.  More of that later, but for now, meeting Erin for the first time in person, she’s a livewire, both in warmth and chattiness, like a stream of consciousness, there is no pause for breath.  She has a wealth of funny stories to tell, many gleaned from her massive Irish family, most of whom are women. “They are Queens” says Erin. 


Erin started writing The Queen of Quex Road in 2019 (whilst still in her 20s) but it’s not her first production. Five-star one woman comedy, Bad Teacher, produced by her own theatre company is about her experiences of teaching. “In one day of teaching you will experience pretty much every single emotion on the spectrum, I love that it’s challenging, that every single day is different, I’m constantly adapting.”  The play premiered in 2021 and had sell out runs at Edinburgh Fringe and VAULT followed by a successful transfer to The Pleasance.  “Playwriting is my peaceful solace” adds Erin, who also admits that her job in teaching prevented her from accepting a part in her play. It’s a steep learning curve for her but she’s enjoying every minute of concentrating on her role as a writer. 


THE QUEEN OF QUEX ROAD


Erin’s love of comedy started with the kind of sitcom her dad watched, but when she hit the teen years, she discovered a love for romcoms like Bridget Jones and Friends. Everything that Erin has written so far is very much comedy heavy. “The Queen of Quex Road is a farce” says Erin, “that kind of Irish humour, it’s very much around hilarious characters in my family who have raised me and influenced my humour”.


Erin didn’t discover that she could hit the funny bone until she was in sixth form, having taken PE instead of drama for GCSE. “I fell in love with drama at A Level, especially devising, I was always very good at characters and accents”.  She tells a story about her Granddad complete with an impersonation of his thick Belfast accent. “He had no teeth, so until I was about eight, I thought he was speaking in different language.” 


Another story just comes tumbling out. It’s impossible to do it justice as Erin is an exceptionally entertaining storyteller, but here goes: It’s a piece of family history about her dad and a friend of his who was left in the living room with her Granddad, smiling and nodding yes at everything he said (and not understanding a word). “My granddad was basically telling him that he’d fallen off the building site and bruised his entire arse … do’ya wanna see it?” says Erin. “Then basically my dad heard a scream from the living room and there is granddad, trousers down …” 


Erin’s own accent is more London estuary having grown up in North London (Queen’s Park and Harrow), but the influence of her Irish heritage is flourishing. The Queen of Quex Road is about three generation of Irish women. The granddaughter Niamh is turning 30 and the grandmother, Kathleen and her daughter Moira fled the troubles and Belfast in the early 90s and they’ve been living in Kilburn for the last 30 years.  Niamh is bringing home her boyfriend for her 30th birthday whom they have never met and didn’t know existed. They’re praying for a good Irish Catholic boy but that’s not who Niamh is bringing. “It’s very, ‘guess who’s coming to dinner’” says Erin. “It’s all set in one room, very fast paced and once they arrive chaos ensues.” 


The question about Erin’s obsession with ‘Queens’ looms large. “I have a very matriarchal side to my writing because I’m surrounded by so many strong women” she says.  The men in her life are severely outnumbered. Not only this, but the generation she grew up in, is that wave of feminism, embodied by Beyonce.  “Like it’s all very about being a Queen, I am a Queen and I need to move around my world as a Queen, recognise the Queens around you and I think that’s always in my subconscious”. 


The other half of the play’s title is inspired by her memories of going to a Sacred Heart in Kilburn where all Erin’s grandparents got married.  “We’d go to church on Quex Road every Sunday, and then go to the social club, have a packet of crisps and a coke, and I just thought this rolled off the tongue, the alliteration.” Kilburn is a very special place for Erin as so many family members grew up there and she spent her childhood visiting them. The flat in which The Queen of Quex Road is set, is the council flat that her dad grew up in on the corner of Abbey Road. “He always loved saying that his address was Abbey Road” adds Erin. 


However, Erin also lived in Queens Park just up the road, but the ‘Queen’ connection starts to get a little supernatural, when we take a break from the interview to admire her nails. “The nail shop is called Queen’s Nails and it’s in Queen’s Park,” she says. 


Erin started writing the play through character, with the Nan, Kathleen, and built the narrative around that. As plays thrive on conflict, there are many layers which exist in The Queen of Quex Road, especially generational differences, such as culture clashes, and differing responses to climate change. Erin herself went through a Vegan phase (which feeds into the play). “I made myself accidentally lactose intolerant , I genuinely can’t have dairy anymore.” 

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE


Erin still has more stories to write. She’s currently working on a tale about a girl climbing Croagh Patric which is Ireland’s holy mountain. “All these older women in bare feet are overtaking her” begins Erin and adds in an aside that this happened to her in real life (“I was like having an asthma attack, and these old women in their 80s, bare foot, just overtook me”). She continues: “The girl feints and then has an apparition from an ancestral witch or banshee and she’s told that she’s a really powerful women and that she needs to get in touch with her power.” 


“It’s all about creating your own luck and believing in your own magic … I’m such a believer in that.” 


Erin believes that we need more female stories, complex women being shown on stage and on screen, and The Queen of Quex Road contributes to that. It’s also her love letter to how inclusive London really is, that London is such a melting pot which she has experienced as a teacher. In all the schools she’s taught in London, there’s over 70 languages spoken. “In our current political climate, post Brexit, even the summer riots last year, I think it’s really important to use comedy as a tool to point out our similarities rather than our differences.”


Erin has another idea for a play, a dystopian world which looks at the question of what would happen if women were in power. “I’m going to have to explore it as I write." Clearly Erin is interested in storytelling in all its forms, but for now the Queen is supreme. 



The Bread & Roses Theatre Company present

THE QUEEN OF QUEX ROAD

4 - 15 March 2025

Directed by Ryan McVeigh

Box Office



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