Excluded from her school

As a girl growing up in Cork, the daughter of a Jewish dentist, she briefly entertained the idea of becoming a nun. "Then I wanted to be an actress, of course, or a dancer, but my father insisted that I go and learn a profession. So I went to teacher training college in England and discovered my real vocation."

Scher wound up in Islington, and for years taught at a local junior school. In 1968, she set up the first version of her theatre in the school hall and soon had more than 70 children attending lessons afterhours. "Eventually, the headmaster told me, very nicely, that we had outgrown the hall," says Scher, "so I had children all over the borough looking for somewhere else for us to go."

In 1973, she settled on an old baptist church on leafy Barnsbury Road, began charging children 10p a session, and set up the charitable trust that now owns the theatre. Classes for kids of any age are run in the evening and at weekends, though the waiting list for places is said to be longer than that at Eton.

It's a matter of intense frustration to Scher that she is now prevented from teaching. "I have so much work to do," she says repeatedly. "All I want to do is teach, I can't help myself, it's my raison d'Ãtre. I have always thought of myself as the catalyst that draws out the talent, and all children have a talent, if not for the dramatic arts then for something else just as good."

The row over the theatre began four years ago, when Scher became severely ill with clinical depression. "I was working very, very hard," she says, "if I could have worked a 25-hour day, I would have done. I was teaching and I was trying to manage a number of problems with the theatre building at the same time, what I call my 'dames and drains' combination. As far as the board was concerned at that time, I felt as though I did not have an empathetic set of people around me. It all stemmed from stress and nervous exhaustion."

Scher admits that her behaviour became erratic. "I think I was compos mentis, but the best way I can describe it is that I felt like a block of cement," she says. "I was in such terrible mental pain that it became physical. I'm a great one for talking to people in the street - but I remember the most horrendous day when I saw a friend in the supermarket and simply could not approach him. I was paralysed, it was like a mental paralysis. It's impossible not to sound over-dramatic, but looking back it really seems as though I was in hell during that time."

Scher's health continued to deteriorate, until eventually she was hospitalised and the theatre had no choice but to employ another head-of-staff, actor and director Andy Smith. Scher spent a total of 10 months in three separate institutions. She says: "It's when things like this happen that you find out who your friends really are ... who has the stamina for you.

"I wandered the corridors in a kind of hopeless state, and no one was able to reassure me that I would have a job to go to, or a theatre, when I got out. I was about as low as you could be. I was in a place worse than despair. The one thing I wanted was my work." She got better simply by waiting for the depression to lift: "In the end it was just time that made me well again and the help of some really good friends."

While Scher was in hospital, the theatre was subtly changed in ways that would later horrify her. The theatre logo was altered and a number of pictures, maps and signs bearing favourite quotes and aphorisms were taken from the walls. When Scher ran the theatre, children under the age of 16 were not allowed to do modelling or advertising work. "I always said to them, when you're 16 you can make your own mind up about it, but until then, I'd rather you didn't sell yourself so cheaply." The theatre's new management set about changing the rule, however, and now children of all ages do both.

When Scher had recovered sufficiently to start work again, in March 2002, she quickly discovered that the board "simply did not want me back. I was asked to pitch for my position again before the board in what I would call a kangaroo court. And the first thing the chairman said was that they could not have anyone with an 'ability deficit' working at the theatre... I was stunned."

The comment has incensed a number of Scher's chief supporters. "We still seem to be living in an age where there is a stigma attached to a woman being depressed," says the actress Linda Robson. "But Anna has been clear for nearly two years, she's back to her old self and it's disgraceful how they have treated her."

Members of the board, meanwhile, insist that Scher could not be reinstated because Andy Smith had been given her job, and the trust could not afford to employ two full-time senior staff members. However, correspondence between Scher and the board seen by the Evening Standard suggests that her unique teaching methods at best irritated some of the businessmen who sat as trustees.

Last month Smith also handed in his notice, claiming that his position had become untenable as a result of the dispute. Now the whole messy row has been handed over to the Charity Commission.

Throughout, one of Scher's greatest regrets has been the loss of the penthouse above the theatre on Barnsbury Road. This was once a "community room" for the use of anyone in Islington who needed a space to meet. Scher claims she spent £70,000 of her own money doing it up. "We've had alcoholics up there, young mothers with post-natal depression, recovering drug addicts, all of them lovely, lovely men and some of my staunchest supporters," she says. "It was a lovely room, so welcoming and friendly. Now, of course, they've changed it all and turned it into a boring office."

Scher still has her foreign projects - over the years she has travelled to trouble spots all over the world teaching "conflict resolution" through drama to both children and adults - and wonders now whether she should set up a "peace school" in London. If she cannot regain control of the Anna Scher Theatre, she will found another rival institution around the corner and call it The Real Anna Scher.

Whatever she chooses to do, she surely has enough energy for it. "Darling, I'm built for work," she says. "I'm not a money person. I've never had much, and I've never worried about it."

She pauses and takes another sip of tea from a chipped mug. "In the end the theatre is only made of bricks and mortar. All I want to do is get back to my children and, as Gandhi said, we must start with the children ..."