TAKEOVER Festival artistic director Lizzy Whynes does indeed open a Pandora's box with her new play Pandora at York Theatre Royal on Saturday night.

This raw and honest devised work explores the depths of the post-traumatic stress disorder Lizzy suffered at the age of five, refracted through the Greek mythology of Zeus giving daughter Pandora a box containing all the evils of the world. Tormented by its contents, Pandora opens the box to find she has been made an accomplice in unleashing a world of horrors.

"The piece came about after I started doodling ideas two years ago and I've been wanting to do it since my university days in York," says the writer-director. "The possibility to make it came at TakeOver, and it began as a two-hander for the Studio but has now become a main-house show with a cast of five.

"So it's grown dramatically, with me writing about 80 per cent of it, and for the bits I hadn't written, I got the actors to work with me, improvising in rehearsals and then I'd write the rest from those sessions."

The resulting blend of devised theatre and choreographed movement forms a 70-minute hybrid of autobiographical story and ancient myth, performed by Lizzy's cast of Fiona Baistow as Pandora, Tom Barry as Zeus, James Knight as Agnetheus, Sophie Bestwick as Demon 1 and Stacey Johnstone as Demon 2.

"We've taken the act of opening the box for the demons to come out as the starting point, using elements of the myth to bring the narrative forward, and if you strip back all the scenes, they're all scenes from my own childhood, while the costumes have a hint of ancient Greece but with a modern take on it," says Lizzy.

She has worked in tandem with two assistant directors, Matt Harper, former co-artistic director of Upstage Centre Youth Theatre, and Roxanna Klimaszewska, from fellow York company Six Lips Theatre. "Where Matt and Rocky have been so good is that before we did the show, I talked to them about it not just being the Lizzy Whynes story; I wanted it to have a wider story, which is why I asked them to help me with that."

Despite its subject matter being rooted in post-traumatic stress disorder in childhood, Lizzy deems Pandora to be an uplifting piece that seeks to "show everyone can find hope in the darkest of places, as hope is the antidote for suffering," she says.

"What I wanted to do is to say the 'unsayable' and to speak of the unspoken things that aren't normally talked about in public, because if you don't discuss them, nothing will get fixed.

"Usually this sort of theatre would be staged in a studio or a bar, so it's great for us to be performing Pandora in the main house. This play has been a brave thing for me to do but I'm glad to have done it as I want it to be a really insightful piece, becase everyone has bad things happen to them, but it's about how you can move on from there and function as a human being.

"I wanted to get across how you deal with those bad things; how sometimes you might first crumble, but at some point you're ready to fight back."

TakeOver Festival 2016 presents Pandora, York Theatre Royal main house, Saturday, 8pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk