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Girl X is based on the American case of Ashley X, which became public in late 2006. Ashley is a girl with a similar impairment to cerebral palsy, whose parents gave her various medical treatments such as drugs to stop her growing and surgery to halt puberty, keeping her small and childlike.

This play doesn’t tell her story but it is a public reaction to what happened.

I’m a 30 year-old man, so the issues of hysterectomy or growth attenuation don’t affect me directly. But, what was allowed to happen in the Ashley X case represents such a frightening view of how we see disabled people; it really scared me that anyone thought this was an acceptable way forward. I hear some debates about euthanasia where I can almost see why someone individually feels that they’ve had enough and that they want to end their life, but in this case it’s someone else deciding for a disabled person that they’d be better off always being the size of a nine year old.

At the time of Ashley X, I was involved in a lot of debates on the web around the moral and ethical issues. The striking divide was between the disability rights groups who thought this was a horrific abuse of power and the wider public who felt that we had no right to interfere with parental decision-making. The latter group could see the benefits for Ashley and felt that disabled people were getting overly emotional about a treatment that could genuinely help her. We took the contents of those internet forums as a starting point for the play.

A lot of what is said in the play seems outrageous because it is said directly to my face, but it came from forums, where people are less guarded. In the real world, the moment a disabled person says something about disability, they’ve automatically got authority. This can often quieten other arguments down. On the internet though, you can say you are disabled even if you’re not, or you can say you’re a young woman when you’re an old man.

Girl X was born when I brought the idea to the National Theatre of Scotland three and a half years ago. They went for it right away. It was NTS who drove the whole project. They put me together with a Belgian director, Pol Heyvaert, who created the concept for the piece. We worked together on the script.

Pol isn’t disabled and, in many ways, he finds the issue of disability rights quite boring. I think that is what made it work because a lot of the conversations that happened on stage, actually took place between myself and Pol first. This ultimately made the play accessible to a wider audience.

On stage during the show, there’s myself, playing a slightly fictionalised version of Robert, and there are 15 choir members who represent society. They haven’t each an original identity as such, but they’re all quite different. Often they speak at the same time, representing a sort of majority opinion that I might agree or disagree with. Then they splinter off, so you might get all the women taking a very feminist argument over the men. The choir take on a whole host of views. I suppose they represent the audience too.

There’s quite a bit of dark humour in it. There is also anger in it, especially from me because I get frustrated with the public opinion. When they get fed up listening to my rants about disability rights, the choir get quite bullyish towards me.

There are songs in it which often seem patronising. Just another thing for me to backlash against. They aren’t quite Avenue Q ... but getting there. One is called There’s No Smoking in Porn. It’s almost impossible to explain what that’s about.

As it’s the National Theatre of Scotland, people know they are going to get a very high quality production. Pol previously wrote a play called Aalst, which was about a couple who killed their children in a hotel room and then tried to defend their actions. NTS’s production of Aalst was a big hit and Pol has gained a good reputation as a director with the Scottish theatre audience because of it. So hopefully people will want to see his interpretation of the ashley x story.

I think that people are also quite interested in this subject and will want to come. I concede that, if this were a smaller company or a disability arts project, then people wouldn’t be that interested.

Disabled people tend to hold the same view about Ashley X as I do and so they are happy to see that represented on stage. People who know the issue very well might want it to go a bit further, get a bit more intellectual, but we had to balance that with making the piece accessible to a wider audience. Theatre, I would argue, isn’t the best place for an in depth lesson on ethics. You can go and get that from a book or from the internet. Hopefully what we do is engage people in the debate and make them feel part of it.

Robert Softley was talking to Emma Tracey.

• Catch Girl X in until the 20th of April.