WHAT are you prepared to do to change the world? What would you damage? Who would you destroy?

These questions are asked in York playwright Hannah Davies and director Tom Cornford's contemporary adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Demons, his 1872 Russian political novel that explores a society in which the poor and powerless are governed by a tiny number of the super-rich, whose young are disenfranchised and whose old are secure and complacent.

In the cracks between these extremes, a small group of activists begins to grow, determined to fight the grotesque inequalities that surround them, but how can they change them and how far should they go?

Presented by students from the University of York's department of theatre, film and television in association with professional York company Common Ground Theatre and the pop-up community art space The Fleeting Arms, the new adaptation repositions Dostoyevsky’s story in the present day and asks what we should be prepared to do to make a new world through radical political action.

"The story has a framework that we're using to explore contemporary society, so we're renaming the characters with English names," says Tom, lecturer in theatre in the TFTV department. "We've also adapted or borrowed from works written recently about radical alternative politics by Naomi Klein [This Changes Everything] and Owen Jones [The Establishment And How They Get Away With It]."

Among the ensemble cast for this 90-minute show is Lucy Theobald, a third year BA Theatre student, who describes the creative process. "It was set out from the beginning that we would share topical articles online and that Hannah, Tom and assistant director Julie McIsaac would look at that media material, and that this mish-mash of information on contemporary society would be drawn into the script," she says.

Julie, a Canadian studying for an MA in theatre, says the cast and writers have had in-depth discussions about what has changed in the past 20 to 30 years, highlighting the rise of technology in politics and the media. "The young generation really play into that, compared with their parents and grandparents," she comments.

Tom rejoins: "Now there are so many parties with so many different strategies, where social media and technology have become much more prominent and can be used as a destructive weapon or in a positive way. By comparison, in Dostoyevsky's time, they communicated by letters, even within a house."

Ensemble cast member James Dixon, another third year BA theatre student, says: "Different people have different relationships with technology in our play and with how it's used. One character, Sean, is a complete geek; Liza had a printing press in the novel, now she is accessing the 'dark web', rather than pamphleteering."

Tom comes in again: "So we look at new ways of getting things on the net without being detected. That's one of the political angles we've adapted from the novel. They had power from having a printing press; now, in our play, power comes from having access to the internet."

The setting has been relocated from Dostoyevsky's Russia. "We're imagining it as a Western city, where we've taken some aspects from Europe, some from Britain, some from America," says Tom. "So it's somewhere like Leeds or Manchester, but not a capital city."

The University of York Department of Theatre, Film and Television's fifth annual summer production, The Demons, will be performed at the Scenic Stage Theatre, Department of Theatre, Film and Television, on June 12 to 14 at 7.30pm; box office: demonsyork.com/ It then transfers to The Fleeting Arms, Gillygate, York, on June 17 and 18 at 7.30pm; box office: yorktheatreroyal.co.uk or 01904 623568