With a little help from his friends

Every day Peter Wolf wakes up wondering what his body will throw at him.

He might start bleeding profusely, water retention could boost his weight to 20 stone, he might turn yellow or become disfigured.

He suffers from a rare condition - affecting about one in 30 million people - an auto-immune disorder that is incurable but treatable and doesn't even have a name. "It's like having a volcano inside you," says the 40-year-old Wolf.

At least he knows to expect the unexpected. Not so 10 years ago, when he was first struck down; he became ill and trapped in his home near Wood Green for five years. "It was a complete catastrophe. I was bright yellow, 20 stone and I couldn't see or talk. I spent two years just lying on the sofa." His career as a playwright, which was just about to take off, came to a dead stop.

Today is a good day. He is talkative, buoyed by the recent birth of his first child, and the fact that his first stage play since falling ill, Into the Mystic, is to be performed at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith. It's all thanks to writernet, formerly the New Playwrighting Trust, and Graeae, the UK's leading theatre company for disabled people, which started a mentoring scheme for disabled writers. It paired Wolf up with Mark Ravenhill, the controversial author of the award-winning Shopping and F***ing, and it turned his life around.

"Although I had written for radio, I hadn't been able to write plays for theatre because I just wasn't able to get to rehearsals - it was too exhausting. When I was interviewed for the mentoring scheme it was done by telephone conference, and then Mark came to my home to work with me."

It was through writing again, with Ravenhill's help, that he managed to put his life back together, with, he says, "the sort of dedication you get when everything has been taken away from you".

"I don't think I could have done this with any other playwright except Mark. He is a genius, an original thinker - he spends hours just thinking rather than writing - and grapples with the zeitgeist, the world as it is. He helped me develop social antennae and taught me that if I can't be bothered to invest myself totally in what I'm writing, no one else will be able to either."

Ravenhill says: "I hadn't been a mentor before, but I had taught. I like to be able to teach because it can help me get my own thoughts in order.

"With Peter, the amount of time he could spend each day on writing was limited because he got so tired, so he wrote at a very slow pace, but I was able to give him a focus, a deadline to write to and some feedback. It sounds simple, but that extra bit of support can really help a writer keep going."

He was also concerned with helping Wolf find his own voice. "That's very difficult. Often people try to write like someone else, and if Peter did that, I tried to stop him. The most exciting thing for me is to read a play which makes me think, 'I could never have written that. How did they do that?'"

That said, the dark, edgy, confrontational style of Ravenhill's work seems to have exerted its influence on Wolf's play, set in a casualty ward and dealing with self-harm and bodily function in graphic fashion. It won't be easy viewing, but Wolf believes he had a duty to Graeae, and to Ravenhill's tutelage, to "go for it".