AFTER Las Vegas, Miami and New York on television, tonight York enters the world of Crime Scene Investigation in the new theatre festival CSI:York.

For the first time, youth theatre groups from York Theatre Royal, fellow York company Riding Lights and the Edinburgh Lyceum will link up for a festival of crime-themed drama that unites young people from different backgrounds and locations.

The six hour-long pieces chosen for the three-day festival will be divided between two locations in the city: the Theatre Royal Studio and Friargate Theatre.

The Theatre Royal will perform three productions, Ali Smith’s Just and youth theatre director Kate Plumb’s productions of Liz Lochhead’s Dracula and Ursula Rani Sarma’s The Spider Men.

Riding Lights will contribute Sophocles’s Oedipus And Antigone and Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui, while the Lyceum company travels south with its devised work, Under The Knife.

Looking forward to this week’s festival, Kate Plumb says: “It’s fantastic to have more than 100 young people from three different youth theatres involved in a project that is the first of its kind in York.

“It’s a great chance for them to develop their acting skills as well as learning how to work in a collaborative environment.”

Audience participation will be another challenge for the companies too, says Kate: “Some of the plays encourage the audience to help solve the crimes and all are exciting and nail biting in their tension.”

Katie Posner, Pilot Theatre’s associate director, is directing Ali Smith’s Just.

“It’s a theatre-of-the absurd piece – very Brechtian – about society’s mistrust of the outsider, satirising Middle England’s fear of individual expression,” she says.

Given the judgemental nature of the sinister and suspicious townspeople in the play – “they don’t like it at all if their world is altered,” says Katie – the director has decided to use a traverse stage design with the audience on either side of the cast.

“There’s a big juicy court scene, and I like the audience to be able to see each other and judge each other and recognise that the play stretches beyond the stage,” she says.

Katie is working with a company of 14 to 16 year olds that will be performing a play for the first time.

“I’m treating them as I would treat professional actors, as I have huge expectations because I know they’ll do a very good job,” she says.

All in all, CSI: York should be well worth investigating.

• CSI:York Crime Scene Investigation runs at York Theatre Royal and Friargate Theatre, Lower Friargate, York, from tonight until Saturday. Box office: 01904 623568.

• Performance times: tonight, Oedipus, 6.45pm, Theatre Royal; Just, 6.45pm and The Spider Men, 8.30pm, Friargate; tomorrow, Under The Knife, 6.45pm, and Arturo, 8.30pm, Theatre Royal; Dracula, 6.45pm, and Just, 8.30pm, Friargate; Saturday, Oedipus, 6.45pm, and Arturo Ui, 8.30pm, Theatre Royal; The Spider Men, 6.45pm, and Dracula, 8.30pm, Friargate.