'A utopian fantasy'

Ten years ago, researching a feature for a Sunday newspaper, I saw the only piece of drama I've ever seen which achieved what many would argue is the theatre's ultimate ambition: to change profoundly the way we look at the world. That performance was held not at the RSC or the National, nor on any of the world's great stages, but at a small, faintly dank semi-fringe theatre called The Place on the Euston Road in dismal central London. The play, The Attraction, was a musical loosely based on the myth of Beauty and the Beast, written and performed by a then little-known outfit called Chicken Shed.

It would be dishonest to pretend that the commission filled me with glee. Chicken Shed, I was briefed, was a theatre company that fully integrated the disabled and able-bodied, and The Attraction was their biggest project so far. To be truthful, I expected, at best, a poorly-written, poorly-performed piece of community theatre; and, at worst, an excruciation which patronised the disabled by affecting to include them in an activity from which their bodies prevented them playing any more than a purely passive role.

What I saw that night was something quite different, something so extraordinary that to this day I can remember not just the plot, the performers and even some of the tunes, but also how I felt - an oddly complex cocktail of emotions ranging from astonishment, wistfulness and a sense of heightened humility to extreme excitement, surging optimism and sheer joy.

What I saw that night wasn't merely a well-written, well-performed musical full of great dancing and songs. It was nothing less than the realisation of a utopian fantasy. On the stage, enraptured in their work and contributing fully to the performance alongside a predominantly able-bodied cast, were young people with what most of us would regard as horrendous difficulties. There was Brendan Walsh, a gifted dancer with Down's syndrome, and Emma Hill, a pretty little girl with the same condition; Lissa Hermans, blind and autistic and with a voice from heaven; Belinda Sharer, a striking blonde woman in her early 20s with cerebral palsy, the result of meningitis in infancy, that keeps her in a wheelchair. And also strapped into a wheelchair was the tiny, jerky frame of Paula Rees, a young woman born with physical disabilities so enormous that it was, perhaps literally, a miracle that she was there at all.

A decade later and Chicken Shed are rehearsing for their starring role in the jubilee procession down the Mall on June 4 when I arrive at their theatre in the north London suburb of Southgate.

In the foyer of this impressive redbrick building, Walsh is waiting to rehearse a dance piece, and at another table Hill sits beside a large tigress of a woman - Jan Rees. She apologises for her daughter's absence: "Paula's got three things on the go, you see," she says. "She's doing a bit of writing over at the Outreach project in Stepney, she's involved in a dance thing called Odyssey, and she's writing a rock opera with Chris Bond, you know, who did Blood Brothers."

Then Jan takes her daughter's doctorate from her bag and hands it over. "Middlesex University. MA Lifelong Learning," announces the front page confidently. "Unit 12. 'Life is good - when you are in it.' Paula Rees - Case Study."

"Life is good when you are in it," is a line I remember from a song Paula wrote for The Attraction, and if Chicken Shed decides to commission its own heraldic crest, it would serves as the ideal motto.

The story of how Paula came to join life is so astounding that, had Christy Nolan not got there first with My Left Foot, it would surely have been turned into a movie. Perhaps it will yet be. She was born with hydrocephalus and cerebral palsy so severe that Jan and husband Eddie were basically told not to bother with her.

A few years ago, Baroness Mary Warnock, then heading the committee on embryology, reflected with misty-eyed fondness on the Edwardian era, when disabled newborns were routinely smothered at birth by the kindly family doctor. In the NHS in 1970, such patrician elegances were not in evidence but even so, when Paula was nine months old, Jan's GP told her that her baby was so cerebrally damaged that she would never be able to so much as recognise her mother.

Jan, already with two older, able-bodied children to look after, ignored the advice to leave her in a mental institution. A decade of anguished isolation on their council estate in Edmonton followed, Paula trapped in her useless body while her family believed the diagnosis that she was unable to think, let alone communicate.

And then one day, when Paula was 10, the miracle happened. When Jan made reference to a picture of a cake in the magazine she was reading, Paula, sitting on her mother's lap, jerked herself forward and touched the picture with her nose. "Then I pointed at this picture of a family in an advert," Jan told me some years ago, "and said: 'Which one is mummy's age?' And again she picked it out with her nose. Then I wrote 'yes' and 'no' on a bit of paper, and she knew which was which."

Somehow, the immense natural intelligence of a girl blithely dismissed as a vegetable by a long sequence of medical experts had enabled her to learn the rudiments of reading.

From this epiphany, it was slow progress. Jan taught Paula to jerk her body one way for yes, the other for no. Paula wept with relief the first time she did so. Later, after reading My Left Foot, Jan attached a device like Christy Nolan's to Paula's forehead so she could point at words.

Despite this, when at 16 and weighing barely more than two stone, Paula needed life-saving surgery on her malformed spine, Jan was told she lacked the mental capacity to justify surgery. Again, she ignored the medical wisdom to fight for her child, and three months later after a pair of six-hour operations, Paula left Great Ormond Street. Two years later, when still no one outside the family would believe that Paula had a mind at all, Jan heard about Chicken Shed, and for her and her family everything changed.

When Paula - who now writes by pointing at words with a stick while someone holds her arm still - joined 14 years ago, says Chicken Shed's director Mary Ward, some things were very different.

Founded in 1974 by Ward, a teacher, and professional musician Jo Collins, and later joined by council care specialist John Bull, Chicken Shed took its name from a barn lent to them for rehearsals in nearby Barnet. It was a conventional theatre group until 1982, when it linked up with a local home for children with physical and emotional difficulties. With the support of wealthy patrons, most notably Max and Jane Rayne (he a onetime boss of the National), it grew in size, but even when the likes of Trevor Nunn, then Arts Council chairman Lord Palumbo and Princess Diana took an interest, they were restricted to working in school and church halls.

Getting money out of the arts and charity establishments was exceedingly difficult, but thanks to their supporters and a lottery grant Chicken Shed eventually raised £6m for its own theatre complex.

Since it opened in 1994, the numbers and range of activities have exploded. Today, there are 850 members, 700 of them under 18, and a waiting list of 3,500. Also, dotted all over London's poorer boroughs and in Manchester, are the outreach programmes: three fully functioning, three almost ready to open and three more in training. And there is a burgeoning educational role. Emma Hill, her mother Susan tells me, is now doing a B.Tech here.

For Susan, who now looks after Chicken Shed's publicity, the story is similar to Jan Rees's. When Emma was born with Down's, Susan was advised to leave her baby at the hospital. For a while, she once told me, she did just that, feeling unable to care for her. When, eventually, she took her daughter home, the doctors wrote her off as useless. Once Emma joined Chicken Shed at eight, the improvement was instant and amazing. Within two years, she had a normal reading age, and now, like Paula, has gone on to higher education.

There are many stories like Emma's to be heard here, tales of children and young people rejected by mainstream education, betrayed by the medical world and written off by educational experts whom Chicken Shed has rescued from the agony of isolation, and whose talents it has allowed to flourish.

Brendan Walsh, a magnetic dancer of 32, is one. He joined at 16, but when, six years later, his mother became terminally ill, he moved across town to live with his sister. No one saw him at Chicken Shed for a year, until one day his sister rang Ward to say that Walsh stood sobbing by the front door every day, waiting to be taken to rehearsals. Since then, Chicken Shed has been his life.

Walsh has gone upstairs to work on his latest dance now, and while one third of the total company is rehearsing in the main theatre for the jubilee, where they have been asked to represent "the future" and will perform their song Together Talking for the Queen, I chat in the foyer with Kim and Selma Cordell, who tell me about their daughter Sophie, who has cerebral palsy and needs a wheelchair. The first time they brought her to Chicken Shed, they explain, was the first time they understood what real integration means. "I was very nervous about leaving her," says Selma. "I said, 'What if she needs the toilet?' They said, 'We'll deal with that. Come back at 8pm.' "

Kim and Selma brought the headmaster of her school here, and he told them it changed his life. Also milling about in the foyer is John Ridgely, a head teacher himself in Tower Hamlets for the past 22 years who now runs the outreach programme in the borough. "The thing I noticed in the first term," he tells me, "is that unless I knew the kids personally I had no idea what their special needs were."

This absolute refusal to pigeonhole people according to their medical history is what first struck the Cordells. "They never even asked about Sophie's disability," recalls Selma. "From the first moment, she was treated like everyone else, and her self-confidence soared. She's always been a shy girl. But she's not shy here."

Watching the jubilee rehearsal, you begin to understand why. Here, in this blissful cocoon of total acceptance, disability - a word they hate here for its implication of limits - is rendered as close as is humanly possible to meaningless. Of the 250 performers working today, about one in four has special needs (another label they dislike - "Denied access to mainstream education and activities" is Susan Hill's catchy alternative), but even with the wheelchairs, you barely notice. No allowances are asked for or given. Of course, a close look at the faces and bodies reveals that some are blind and others have one or even two prosthetic legs. But such is the naturalness and subtlety of the integration - small children with disabilities resting quietly against older, able-bodied ones; wheelchairs worked into the performance rather than standing outside it; unobtrusive signing for the deaf - these things soon cease to dominate your vision. Within a few minutes, what you see, primarily, is a large group of disciplined and talented performers perfecting an expertly choreographed musical dance.

Bizarre as it may seem to anyone unschooled in the politics of disability, it is precisely this integration that makes it so difficult for Chicken Shed to come by proper funding from statutory bodies. That and the misperception, founded largely on Princess Diana's patronage, that it is a well-funded, establishment plaything.

Today, the company employs about 100 people, the majority are full-timers, and has annual outgoings of £2m, which it meets through fundraising and some grants. But developing work is a problem, since there is no money to pay outside writers, and touring is an impossibility. When it applied to one funding body for £30,000, it was told it could have £10,000 because only one in three of the company has a disability, and it didn't want to fund the able-bodied. On similar grounds, and despite her own close involvement, the Princess Diana Fund has turned it down. Other charities believe that segregation is preferable to integration. One very senior arts figure told them, almost comically, that they were ineligible because they don't "push back any barriers".

There is, needless to say, as much jealousy, rivalry and ideological warfare in the world of charity as elsewhere. Even so, it is difficult not to sympathise with the quiet Collins and Ward - as inspirational a proselytiser of a cause as you will ever meet - when their frustration bubbles over. "The arts establishment think we're well-funded, middle-class people with no political message," says Collins. "They're wrong. We're the radicals."

"When we started," adds Ward, "we assumed society was open. We quickly found it wasn't, and since then we've taken something on - prejudice - and tried to destroy it. Our own prejudice as much as anyone else's.

"I'll never forget the first time we held a session with disabled actors. I said to Jo: 'How do you talk to such people?' She said: 'Well, how do you normally talk to people?' It took us time, because none of us had any experience of it. But we've done it, and so could everyone else.

"We're just ordinary people who hit on a good idea and developed it. I know what goes on here. I know how people's lives are changed. And I know that what they [the arts and funding establishments] are doing by turning us down year after year is stopping more people having their lives improved."

Another trip to the balcony to watch the rehearsal seems to make the point. Certainly the notion that this is a predominantly middle-class company is stretched by the sight of many black and Asian children from areas of urban deprivation such as nearby Tottenham.

Alongside the poor, the disabled and those labelled as having behavioural problems ("They don't have behavioural problems here", as Mary puts it), is Dina who recently won a scholarship to the London Contemporary Dance School. "They take 50 people a year there, and give five scholarships. So you can imagine how talented Dina is. Yet this interests and excites her. And when she works with Brendan, they are equals."

And there are the middle-class gap-year kids waiting to go to university. Ward shows me a postcard from a girl called Maev, now at Oxford, thanking her for the experience and quoting George Bernard Shaw. " 'You see things And say why? But I dream things And say "Why not?" ' If we used people like Maev as glorified auxiliary nurses, we'd be letting them down," says Ward. "Someone like her gets just as much out of this as someone like Sophie. This is something she will take through her degree and through her life. She will leave Oxford and go out and try to make it a better world."

Ward points out a girl in grey trousers. "She's only got one leg. On her first day here, her mother took pictures of her dancing, and then showed them to other parents at Great Ormond Street, so they could see what can be done. That girl doesn't want to go and rehearse with disabled people. She doesn't consider herself disabled. Why should she?"

When I ask Ward what one little girl's physical problem is, I am mildly rebuked. "It's not important. That's our point. Those labels are meaningless here. Here she is just another performer. That able-bodied girl she is leaning against is just as important as she is, and they are both getting a great deal out of it."

In fact, the little girl is called Beth, and she has cerebral palsy. Her mother drives her over from Epsom, just as Susan Hill used to drive her Emma over from High Wycombe. The question of why there is nothing like Chicken Shed in Surrey or Buckinghamshire, or indeed anywhere else in the world, hangs over the conversation unphrased.

Much more has changed for Chicken Shed since I first met them 10 years ago than moving into this marvellous theatre. The company has appeared in royal galas and had a top 20 single. Ward has been on This Is Your Life, and she and Collins have been given MBEs. With Bull, this remarkable triumvirate has developed its work immensely, in education and by staging many shows that have stood as outstanding musical theatre in their own right - most recently their version of A Midsummer Night's Dream - but which have captivated audiences on an entirely different level, by allowing them what Trevor Nunn once called "a glimpse of a more perfect world".

And much has not changed. Their own dream of appearing on a West End stage (or better still the National) has come no closer than a ceremony to thank friends at the Playhouse in Charing Cross, at which Jeremy Irons and Kenneth Branagh, among many other Hollywood names, turned out not to receive awards but to give them.

For all the big-name supporters, or perhaps partly because of them, the struggle for funds to expand its work and go on a national tour remains as gruelling as ever. But unchanged above all is the ferocious commitment to propagating their utopian message. "Without Chicken Shed," says Jan Rees, "I think my Paula would have given up on life. I know she would." Jan hands me Life is Good When You are in it, the MA thesis written by a woman who now not only writes lyrics but dances in her wheelchair, and whom a disability magazine once described as "A living, breathing prop."

I read it on the long tube journey west. It is, predictably, a wonderfully thoughtful, moving piece of writing in Paula's distinctive, seductively opaque style. "Chicken Shed means for me an open world and an untouched slate," begins section two. "In Chicken Shed it is all about what I can do. If there was a new verb - a verb for all the things involved in the phrase 'go for it' - then the verb 'to Chicken Shed' would fit.

"Is it possible or impossible for me to say in Chicken Shed I can move? Outside I can't. Inside Chicken Shed I can speak. Outside I can't."