YOUNG York company NUEMusic Theatre turned the 41 Monkgate theatre on its head last week.

The audience was stationed on three sides of the stage, the band positioned high above those sat in the central seating, where the stage would normally be.

Scaffolding clad the wall by the exit, providing additional performing space, the black wall being used by director and film-maker Cal O’Connell to project film footage.

Here is a precocious company that “likes to do our own thing”, shaking up musical theatre in York with refreshing cheek and chutzpah. They take risks, not all of them of successful – your reviewer’s position at the side meant seeing backs rather than faces for too many of the big numbers, for example – but they give off more energy than Drax and Ferrybridge combined and it is no wonder that so many of their principals are bound for theatre schools this autumn.

After the gay love story of Bare: A Pop Opera and Bat Boy: The Musical, a kind of Rocky Horror Show-style retelling of Tim Burton's outsider movie, Edward Scissorhands, the 1996 American rock opera Rent completed NUEMusic’s hat-trick of thrilling choices for their first three shows.

Its story is set between two Christmases and revolves around two squatters, former junkie punk singer, guitarist and composer Roger Davis (Aran Macrae) and videographer Mark Cohen (the outstanding Lee West).

Roger is HIV positive, and so is his new girlfriend, Mimi Marquez (Lauren Sheriston), a heroin-addicted exotic dancer at a sadomasochist club. Meanwhile, Mark's performance-artist girlfriend, bisexual Maureen Johnson (Robyn Grant), has dumped him for a woman, Joanne Jefferson (Grace Lancaster).

Caught up in the story too are Jed Berry’s cross-dressing Angel, newly partnered with Joe Douglass’s Tom Collins, and the rent-demanding Benjamin Coffin III (Mikhail Lim) Rent emerged in the shadow of the sudden death of its writer, Jonathan Larson, and the even bigger shadow of AIDS, and it still has a rough edge to its songs, especially in the second half, as if Larson might have done further work, given the chance.

Yet it is the imperfections and rawness that gave Rent its cult status, and NUEMusic pointedly sought to restore the show’s original spirit of defiance before it became associated with a specific fashion look and its songs were turned into a smooth-flowing concert version.

Driven by University of York post-graduate student Tom Marlow’s invigorating musical direction and a confrontational style of performance so close up to the audience, O’Connell’s production restored the frankness and immediacy of Rent’s off-Broadway origins. At the same time, the company decided to update the setting from 1996, when AIDS was the plague whose reach was not yet known, to 2013 “because it’s still very relevant when we're all a bit lost and we're skint”.

Yes, it is still relevant, especially its depiction of the impact of drugs and poverty, but we now know much more about AIDS, and so the sense of urgency, fear and desperation of 1996 has dissipated. Rent is a period piece and is better suited to being played in that era, but what does carry through to today is both the electrifying thrill of its rock, blues, gospel and soul score and the importance of camaraderie and love, whether in New York’s East Village or elsewhere.

As they promised, NUEMusic gave the ground-breaking Rent a new lease of life, steam rising from the cast in the hothouse of 41 Monkgate, where Sheriston and Grant in particular sang with character and power and Berry’s Angel stole the show.

Bon voyage to all those headed for drama school; Rent was a spectacular send-off.