The Equality Act of 2010 (UK) legally protects disabled people, or those with other ‘protected characteristics’, from discrimination. It requires employers and service providers to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ to ensure that disabled people aren't disadvantaged because of their impairments or their physical or mental health conditions.

That same year, in 2010, I co-founded Touretteshero with Jess Thom in response to her diagnosis of Tourettes Syndrome. Our aim was to celebrate the humour and creativity of the condition and change the world ‘one tic at a time’. Jess and I come from a background in adventure play and we fell into theatre by accident after being asked to sit separately from the rest of the audience while watching Extreme Rambling by Mark Thomas due to a complaint about Jess's tics. This experience became the provocation for our first show, Backstage in Biscuit Land. In a monologue that we referred to as ‘the serious bit’, Jess says: ‘I was gutted. We were watching something about segregation, about separation, and I wasn't welcome to watch it with other people … I couldn't concentrate on what Mark was saying because I felt utterly, utterly humiliated, embarrassed and alone. I wanted to leave straight away and never come back. It felt like an experience I could not or should not access because it was damaging to me.’ We took Biscuit Land to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2014 with the sole intention of seeing if we could do it, and with no idea what to expect. It sold out, won a Total Theatre award and went on to tour nationally and internationally for the next three years.

In 2015, during a meeting with another theatre company, we mentioned that we were interested in creating a neurodiverse production of Samuel Beckett's short play Not I. A member of the other company jokingly told us we would never get permission from the Beckett estate. We took this as something of a challenge and, using the Equality Act as a framework, I began wondering what ‘reasonable adjustments’ we could expect in order to make Not I work for Jess's unique neurology.