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Natasha Wood has a comedian's ability to provoke laughter from her disability.

She is a bawdy 30-something Brit who is winning four-star reviews for her one-woman play, Rolling with Laughter.

The title is based on her life in a wheelchair with spinal muscular atrophy, an inherited neuromuscolar disability that has cost her the use of her legs and gradually her arms. The affliction inhibits signals from the brain to the muscles and some impulses fail to connect. Wood cannot walk and can lift only the lightest of objects.

"It's about the movers and shakers in my spine," she says. "They ain't moving and shaking."

Wood worked as a BBC production manager behind the camera before deciding to step in front.

Rolling with Laughter is praised for its lack of sappy sentimentality, although some viewers consider her script to be vulgar in spots. She portrays 30 characters from her life, including her ex-husband, as she buzzes around the stage in a customized top-of-the-line wheelchair donated by an admirer of her comedic but truthful artistry. This comedian's description of "the one thing that the wheelchair lacks" maintains her R-rating, and so curious readers of this page will need to check the script.

She is a petite blonde but she has been described as "Mae West on wheels," referring to the chesty and flirtatious American diva from the early days of movies. Indeed she boasts of having received a "boob job," but it was not for the usual reason. Doctors corrected a congenital lack of symmetry in her breasts.