Doré pushes the limits again

High above Cambridge Circus, where kamikaze pigeons dare, is the top-floor office that once belonged to Trevor Nunn in his pre-National Theatre days as a Master of the West-End Universe.

Katharine Doré has bagged that prime site now as the producer of Matthew Bourne's Adventures In Motion Pictures, the crossover company whose male Swan Lake broke down the barriers between dance and musical theatre, sexed up the ballet as never before and created an international mass-market for its artistry with attitude.

Six feet of high energy in T-shirt and blue jeans, the can-do Doré bounds into the room like a basketball player. Yet success has been achieved under the toughest of circumstances for this single mother of an autistic son. So frustrated was she by the lack of educational provision for her only child Toby and others like him that, just as AMP was taking off into the stratosphere four years ago with Swan Lake, she started up her own school, the TreeHouse Trust, with Nick Hornby's ex-wife Virginia and other parents.

The plight of Toby, who didn't even learn to point a finger until he was four, has certainly helped to put other communication problems into perspective. Doré is currently exasperated over a newspaper story on AMP's latest show, which, she says, gives completely the wrong seedy impression of a production billed as an "auto-erotic thriller" with music from Bizet's Carmen. The Car Man is pushing boundaries back still further with a prison scene of male rape and a shower scene of male nudity in the small-town tale of a young wife's seduction by a bisexual stranger.

"It's not rape as you would see in a movie; this is dance, it's highly stylised, there's nothing offensive," she argues. "This company has got a big enough following not to need to employ shock tactics."

Approached to develop a West-End production for Disney, AMP has also beaten off fierce competition to secure the rights to a stage version of Tim Burton's film fable, Edward Scissorhands, next year. Meanwhile, Bourne and Doré are hatching plans to film The Car Man and an earlier show, Highland Fling, known as Trainspotting - The Ballet. Things don't get much better than this, yet success couldn't have come at a more cruel time.

"My little chap was diagnosed as autistic at three in the same week that we opened Swan Lake at the Piccadilly. Even now he's very jealous of Swan Lake and sees it as the thing that competes for my attention; if he sees a picture of a swan anywhere, it gets put away very quickly. I spent a very, very unhappy few months when I considered uprooting and going to America because of the special education available there, but then it struck me that the only answer was to start a school here myself. Through AMP, we were able to raise enough money to get it up and running; it's completely self-supporting now."

TreeHouse has now been recognised by the Department of Education as a centre of excellence, while the change in Toby, she says, is "enormous. He still has very few words, but what has changed beyond all hope is his understanding." She and Virginia Hornby are both trustees of the school, while Nick helps out at every opportunity. She became AMP's administrator in 1988, 10 months after Bourne had started the company with friends. Doré, whose late father was a vicar, has come a long way since the days when she used to clamber over the wall of her boarding school to see plays at the Bristol Old Vic with a stage-struck friend. The other girl wanted to act, but already Doré was entranced by the bigger picture. When she left at 17 to study stage management at Central on the advice of the actor Nickolas Grace, the headmaster remarked: "You know how people in the theatre get on? On their backs."

It took her, she said, "two years before I realised what he had been talking about. It was a nasty thing to say; but they had no understanding of theatre. We have no casting couch in this company."

She's a descendant of Gustave Doré, the 19th-century French artist and illustrator whose grimly evocative engravings of low-life London revealed sulphurous back-streets hidden from history. Katharine could be said to have plumbed a few depths of her own as she put the costumes through her washing machine by night before driving the AMP minibus, moving the scenery and fixing the lighting by day. There were times, she says, when she and Bourne ran the company out of their kitchens. After such bonding, it comes as no surprise that Bourne, a gay man without children, is godfather to Toby. "Earlier this year Matt and I were both 40; it's a time when you stop to consider. We decided we wanted to carry on running AMP together, though we both have aspirations to do things without each other too. I'm lucky that I have immense focus in my life: my child who depends totally on me because of his disability, and this company that I love with a passion. Both keep the other in context."