'Why should severely disabled kids be denied theatre?'

John Crace meets people behind the scenes of Oily Cart, a charity being supported by the Guardian and Observer appeal
A performance by the Oily Cart theatre company
A performance by the Oily Cart theatre company.

The performance of In a Pickle starts with Baa-r-baa-ra and the other sheep handing out hats to the audience of toddlers and their parents in the foyer of the Unicorn Theatre. Over the following hour or so, the children are invited to fall asleep on a rug with the sheep, smell flowers, blow bubbles, sing, get their hands wet in troughs filled with water and shells, decide what should happen to a baby with green paper leaves for hair, and try to bring a statue back to life. By the end, they are all immersed in the story and happily listening to uncut lines of Shakespeare's Winter's Tale.

It used to be an accepted theatre axiom that it was a waste of time creating drama for the under-fives; they didn't have the attention span or language skills and were terrified of their own shadows. Then, in the early 1980s, along came Oily Cart, the brainchild of Claire de Loon, Max Reinhardt and writer and director Tim Webb, to blow these assumptions out of the water.

"We all had young families," Webb says, "and we wanted to find out if it was possible. So we set out to create a style of theatre that used a multi-sensory and immersive approach, one to which even pre-verbal children could respond."

Their approach quickly paid off and Oily Cart was recognised as one of the UK's leading children's theatre companies. But what happened next was equally as innovative.

"In 1988, a headteacher in west London invited us to give a performance at his school for young people with severe learning difficulties," Webb says. "He had seen the impact we had made on very young children and thought we might be able to reach out to his pupils in a way that no other theatre group could."

Webb quickly realised that further adaptations would be required.

"Just because some of these pupils might have the same cognitive and physical abilities of the under-fives, it didn't mean they shared the same life experiences," he says. "The challenge for us was to find a form of multisensory theatre that would also mean something to an 18-year-old.

"Pitching a show so that everyone gets something out of it is immensely difficult, as the range of abilities in a special school is far wider than you find anywhere else.

"The audience could vary from someone on the autistic spectrum who can one day expect to live semi-independently, to another with severe cognitive and physical disabilities who will need someone to look after them for the rest of their life."

Although Oily Cart now has more than 20 years' experience, creating successful theatre for disabled children is still partly a process of trial and error.

"The first step is to form a relationship with the audience well in advance of the performance," Webb says. "Some disabled children take a while to get used to new faces, so we try to give them some idea of what to expect by sending teachers and carers a YouTube link to the work in progress. Apart from getting the children used to the actors, this also allows us to get some initial feedback of their responses so we can adapt what's working best.

"Even then you can only do your best and you can never be entirely sure that one or two of the kids aren't thinking: 'Why don't these clowns just bugger off and leave me to listen to Radio 3?'"

Every show is something of a high-wire act for the actors and requires those with a particular skill-set.

Griff Fender, best known as a vocalist for the 70s band The Darts, and dancer Laura Street have worked with Oily Cart for many years. "These children often live in the moment," says Fender. "They don't necessarily have our same sense of narrative cause and effect, so you can never relax and assume they are filling in gaps in the story as you can with conventional audiences. You are constantly having to work with the clues the children and their carers give to discover the best form of communication and be ready to switch from one sensory approach to another."

"It's utterly exhausting," Street adds. "Acting for disabled children leaves me with a profound tiredness that I don't get in any other form of performance. You have to be full on the whole time. There's often only six children and their carers at each performance, so there is plenty of time to make one-to-one connections with each person. You have to be the very best you can be every time; if you're anything less with an autistic child, they will see straight through you.

"You also have to be ruthlessly honest. There was once show we did, where I had to start by saying: 'Hello, my name is Shooby Dooby', and this kid just interrupted and said: 'No you're not, you're just pretending'. In a conventional performance, I would have just continued and said I was Shooby Dooby, but that wouldn't work with him. So I had to think on my feet and improvise: 'You're right, but is it OK if I pretend to be for the next hour?' Waiting for him to say yes, felt like the longest 30 seconds of my life. I'm still not sure what I would have done if he had said no."

And the actors' efforts do make a difference. Even if it isn't immediately obvious. "There was one particular child I really thought I wasn't getting through to at all," Fender says. "He just sat there motionless and expressionless no matter what I tried and at the end I talked to his carer about what else I might have done. She laughed and said: 'You're kidding. He moved his finger. He almost never does that. You've made his day.'"

None of this comes cheap. Putting on tailored performances for small groups of severely disabled children is not what many firms would consider financially viable. And despite grants from the Arts Council and other organisations, there's seldom enough to go round.

"There's so much more we could do," Street adds. "Why should severely disabled kids be denied an experience of theatre?"

• You can donate online to the Guardian and Observer Christmas appeal 2012. All donations will be shared equally among our eight charities.

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