Smashing Times helps to bring the marginalised to centre stage - withoutlowering standards, writes Christine Madden

She's sitting up in a bed on stage. And Hannah, played by Helena Browne, is adamant about the collection of her poems she has just presented to her daughter Edie, played by Fiona Browne. "No interviews," she insists. "All they ever want to talk about is my disability."

Helena and Fiona Browne are actors, but others on stage may well be wearing greasepaint for the first time, facilitated by Smashing Times theatre company. The production in which they all appear, Out Of The Outside, derives from the company's workshops at residential centres and with disability groups.

For more than 10 years, Smashing Times has used its dramatic expertise to help bring those who are out of the outside of society to centre stage. The company grew out of a 1991 initiative by a group of female members of Focus Theatre who wanted to create their own work. Initially based on women's issues, the company broadened its focus over time to include members of the community who find themselves dangling at its edge.

In the beginning, says founding member Mary Moynihan, they literally got on the bus to Tallaght to put on their productions. "We discovered that people wanted to talk about the issues of the plays, and so workshops developed out of that. It was a natural process."

Smashing Times began to work in the community, hosting drama workshops that enabled participants to voice their concerns and frustrations about issues central to their lives.

"We wanted to broaden theatre, make it accessible to people's lives," says Moynihan. "People came to realise that their ideas represented a unique culture within that community, that art was not just for somebody else. We don't just go in and say, this is what art is."

Now, as well as addressing hot topics that well up in group work, Smashing Times has begun to start the dramatic process with the focus on an issue of their choosing. Out Of The Outside emerged from this different method.

Written by Moynihan and directed by Joseph Campbell, the play vents the immense frustration of people with disabilities and targets an oblivious society's lack of concern. "Even if we take a single issue out of that play - access - you get their sense of frustration at their inability to get around due to things like kerbs and lifts," says Freda Manweiler, the company director.

"Even trying to find wheelchair- accessible performance space - it took weeks. Things like, you can't have more than two wheelchairs in a space because it was a fire hazard. It was a real learning curve."

These complaints and many others found their way into the script: rants against the injustice included "It's apartheid," "Society disables us" and "When did you ever see a condom machine in a disabled toilet?"

Next on Smashing Times's performance agenda is A Journey Through The Markets. This production echoes a previous project, in which Smashing Times ran workshops for a performance to explain the history of Ringsend, in Dublin. With this, says Moynihan, "we had developed a model that can be used in other areas".

A Journey Through The Markets examines the history of the Smithfield community through personal histories and anecdotes. To put the play together, the writer and director Paul Kennedy filmed locals to get their stories.

"You'd get a situation where Paul would be filming at someone's house, and then the TV would be turned off, and the kids would come in and then the neighbours would come in, too," says Manweiler.

Acted out by the people telling the stories of their parents' and grandparents' lives, "this project brings people back to how they got to where they are now", she says.

These projects represent only a fraction of Smashing Times's activities. Performed earlier in the year, Silent Screams celebrated cultural diversity to raise awareness of racism and the plight of refugees. Another project, Drama in the Docklands, promotes creativity and access to theatre skills.

As well as supporting an adult group in St Andrew's Resource Centre, on Pearse Street in Dublin, it draws on workshops with two inner-city schools to culminate in a performance at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, at Trinity College, in the summer.

Another project, Women Acting for a Better World, will run drama workshops as part of an outreach programme for community and women's groups and refugee centres, with a professional performance to follow at Project Cube in October.

In something of a departure for the company, part of its five-year plan is for corporate services, in which it uses its expertise to enhance business skills. The programme, which includes workshops for stress management, public speaking and presentation, the "drama of persuasion" and exploring bullying and harassment in the workplace, started as a combination of two things, says Manweiler. One is funding - providing a service to the corporate world spins much- needed money for a company that has received project funding from the Arts Council but hopes someday to be part of the council's core programme. "We don't have a lot of steady, secure funding, and this provides revenue," says Manweiler. "And we also recognised that we had something that worked in terms of people's communications skills. The programme has worked really well."

With Queen's University Belfast, Smashing Times is about to launch a project aimed at reaching even more people. Creative Training in Community Drama is a cross-cultural, cross-border initiative, the first of its kind, which will teach people to lead community drama groups, explains Tara Jenkins, the project's co-ordinator.

Starting in September and running for nine months, courses combining theory and practice will address issues of peace building and reconciliation through drama and theatre. "These people will be able to present to their own communities options for change and cultural exchanges with other villages," she predicts.

Smashing Times's work has already wrought far-reaching changes in the lives of participants. "The company has visited people something like five years later, and people have gone on," says Jenkins. "People have learned to deal with society in different, satisfying and fulfilling ways. Some people have gone on to do drama, to write, become counsellors or start their own youth groups."

Yet to imagine that the company compromises quality to produce broad-based theatre puts it wrongly "out of the outside". "Because we are professionals working in a community setting, people see us as a community-theatre company - but we aren't," says Manweiler.

"The goal is towards a strong artistic product - and if that's the goal, the other things happen naturally."

Their success and growth bear them out. "You can evolve the community and still achieve excellence," says Moynihan.

"We are simply working in a different theatre space. Just because we work within the community, that doesn't lower the level of professionalism that's involved. At the end of the day, we're artists and always reach for a high level of excellence."

A Journey Through The Markets is at the National Museum of Ireland, Collins Barracks, Dublin, today and tomorrow at 8 p.m. (01-8656613). The performance of the Drama in the Docklands project is on June 6th. For more information about the company, see www.smashingtimes.ie