CRIME pays for York Theatre Royal in a three-day youth theatre festival that ends today.

Together with York company Riding Lights and their Scottish guests from the Edinburgh Lyceum Theatre, they are presenting six, hour-long, crime-related dramas, four of them tonight.

The festival has taken the companies out of their familiar performance space, to give them new stage experiences, as well as uniting disparate performers under one theme.

Thursday night found two of the Theatre Royal’s youth groups crossing town to perform on the traverse stage at Friargate: a bear-pit design that places the audience on either side of the performers to crank up the judgemental atmosphere for two pieces of theatre that each have a crime scene.

For Ali Smith’s Just, there is a bus stop at one end and a pot plant at the other, both decorated with apples. In between is the white outline of a dead body; at its centre an umbrella protrudes from a brick, raising the curiosity of Victoria, a girl in an apple T-shirt. “Murderer!” decides hasty Albert, a policeman with a propensity to fantasy and a habit of using the wrong word.

Welcome to the theatre of the absurd, peopled by groups of bigoted townsfolk, the absurdity heightened by Katie Posner casting Victoria and Albert in triplicate in a show that is visually playful and verbally fun.

The bus stop remains, the plant makes way for a teen bedroom for another tale of outsiders, Ursula Rani Sarma’s darker drama, The Spider Men, a rather strange study of teenage angst, identity, individuality, superheroes and disappearances.

The age-old youth theatre problem of girls outnumbering boys impacts on Kate Plumb’s casting, and while this adds to the mystery, it further complicates an already oblique play that runs again tonight at 6.45pm.

*CSI: York, Crime Scene Investigation, York Theatre Royal and Friargate Thetare, York, tonight at 6.45pm and 8.30pm. Box office: 01904 623568.