My disability helped me understand Blanche DuBois, says Streetcar actor

There was a day in the runup to the opening of Secret Theatre's Show One, Woyzeck, at the Lyric Hammersmith in 2013, when the ensemble company, set up by Sean Holmes, went into meltdown.

Actor Nadia Albina explains: "We had been rehearsing hard. We were manic. We kept sending each other music, lyrics, lectures, videos, scenes from films that we thought were relevant. It was exhilarating but it was scary, too. We were constantly chewing on things. We were arguing a lot. It was fertile but there was also a lot of misery in the room. We had got tired. Sean would try to direct a scene and he'd get nine different opinions thrown at him. We knew we'd lost sight of what we were doing. We had so much stuff that we no longer even knew what the plot was any more. We just sat in a room for four hours and for the first 20 minutes nobody spoke at all. It felt terrible."

It's all too rare and refreshing to hear artists admitting that making theatre isn't always easy, and that the rehearsal room can be a genuine place of discovery, even if you don't always like everything you discover. Albina's openness is partly the product of her natural warmth but is also perhaps a reflection of the experimental nature of the Secret Theatre venture, a project born out of necessity – the Lyric was about to be turned into a building site – and a mixture of rebellion, passion and curiosity about British theatre and its possibilities. Who said changing things was ever going to be easy?

"When you are trying to do something different and change established ways of working, it's difficult. Our ambitions and people's expectations have been so high from the start. Maybe you have to fail to find a way to make it work," says Albina.

Holmes's rousing speech at the launch of Secret Theatre last June set the tone for the season in which the titles are not announced in advance so the evening has an element of surprise for the audience. The season hasn't quite set the world on fire, but has certainly asked plenty of crucial questions about the role of directors, performers, writers and dramaturgs, the biggest statement so far has been the fresh-minted, radical version of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. Albina – whose right arm finishes at the elbow – was cast as Blanche.

"My feeling is that Streetcar is going to make people fucking furious. David Hare does what he does; that's allowed. What you can't do: Blanche can't have one fucking arm," declared Holmes in an interview, in the typically combative fashion that has sometimes characterised Secret Theatre and made it feel that if you are not 100% for it, you must be against it. I don't think I can recall a project that has excited quite such passion, except possibly the Lyric's controversial production of Three Kingdoms, which itself created the impetus for Secret Theatre.

Well, as Albina proved, Blanche can "have one fucking arm", and this week, along with three other Secret Theatre shows – Woyzeck, The Chamber and Glitterland – the production is at Northern Stage in Newcastle, the first of 10 two-week residencies in theatres across the country made possible by a one-off ACE grant of £265,000. That feels like a vote of confidence in a project that has been as much about process and potential as it is about product.

Albina, who prior to joining the Secret Theatre ensemble was probably best known for her zinging performance as the mouthy Janine in Graeae's riotous Ian Drury musical, Reasons to be Cheerful, never dared to hope that anyone might cast her as Blanche, despite the fact that she has loved the play since she was a teenager. Even after Holmes told the ensemble that he had the rights to Streetcar, Albina was preparing herself for the fact that she wouldn't play Blanche.

"When he said, 'Nadia, you will be Blanche', I froze. I was worried that my disability would be a lens through which everything would be seen. That fear of that has never gone away."

Inevitably, there were some reviews that huffed and puffed, with one blogger dismissing the idea of a Blanche Dubois with a disability as "ludicrous": it was a reminder just how far British theatre still has to go to counter the prejudice disabled performers face. "I'd love to speak one on one with that reviewer," says Albina, who points out that some progress is being made when it comes to casting. Both the NT and the RSC held open auditions for disabled actors earlier this year. "Since the Paralympics, it feels as if there's been a bit of a ripple effect, at least more awareness. But there is no way we can relax. Just because I or somebody else gets one good job, it doesn't mean the battle is won."

It's not, but one of the things that this Streetcar proved (alongside the fact that you don't have to play Williams in southern accents) is that visible disability can enhance and layer a classic text in fascinating ways, both emotional and political. Matt Trueman remarked that "Albina's disability makes every mention of beauty ping out of the text". Albina says that, as a disabled woman, she is used to feeling "isolated, not belonging, an alien in your surroundings" and all those feelings are heartbreakingly apparent in her Blanche, a woman who also feels like an alien in her surroundings.

It will be interesting to see how the productions fare on tour because part of their appeal at the Lyric is the fact that it is essentially a giant building site, so every show has the benefit of feeling like a dramatic pop-up with a disruption of expectation because you simply don't know quite where the show will be performed. The secret element – source of so much controversy with some berating critics who gave away the names of the plays – is also diminished: on the Northern Stage website the titles are on full display.

Albina thinks the latter is no bad thing. "Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but there was so much hype around the secret element that it became unhelpful, a red herring. The secrecy became more important than the work, and that wasn't what was intended at all."

She's looking forward to being out on the road and also going to the Edinburgh fringe in the summer where Secret Theatre 5 will premiere, although this devised piece – appropriately about endeavour and failure – has already been in preview at the Lyric, where it has attracted quite a buzz.

"I said to Sean the other day that we probably need three years together to know what we are really about. But with Show 5 it feels as if we might be getting there. We couldn't have made it without making the other shows. We had to find the language. But this one feels as if it's in our bones."