A BOX is delivered to a rehearsal room, addressed to a youth theatre group of 11 to 13 year olds and sent with the best wishes of another.

A third group exchanges boxes too, and from the weird and wonderful contents are spun three short devised plays, in which those contents will be used as props in performances in the York Theatre Royal Studio from tomorrow night until Saturday.

Billed as “our gift to you”, the plays each will be given two performances on one night only, each directed by a Theatre Royal youth theatre freelance practitioner. Tomorrow, Jenna Drury’s company presents Gifted, a dark adventure about newly deceased explorer, nun and incurable eccentric Dot Partridge, her small fortune and sibling rivalry over objets d’art in her Museum of Curiosity.

Saturday’s Tracks Of Time, directed by Paula Clark, takes a journey that spans three different time periods over 50 years, opening in 1994 but travelling back to wartime 1944, as an old lady climbs aboard a train with a sepia photograph, determined to prove we are all intertwined.

In between, on Friday, education administrator and playwright Jessica Fisher’s group presents Once, where the new recruits of MI9 have one chance to save themselves.

Jessica explains how the play took shape. “Before Christmas each group created a box with anything they thought would be inspiring: it could be poems, a quote; it could be smells, objects, photographs. The contents would be a complete surprise to whichever group received it, who took it as inspiration in the first week of rehearsals to start creating a play,” she says.

“In our box, given to us by Paula’s group, were all sorts of things but we gravitated towards the objects. There was a queen-shaped cookie cutter; a Chihuahua dog bowl; a straw hat; paper planes…and a custard pie-making kit and can of squirting cream that unfortunately we’re not using!

“We gave Jessa’s group a bottle of fake blood, foreign stamps, a couple of poems, a Tim Burton soundtrack compilation, as I encouraged my group to think about different senses and things that would inspire people. For some, it would be music, for some a picture, for some an object they could pick up.”

The vast majority of the ideas for Once came from Jessica’s 25-strong cast, rather than her. “That’s why I’ve so enjoyed it as their imagination is amazing,” she says. “Our group worked on creating characters around objects, where that object was their most important possession and they had to decide why. Assassins were very popular, spies were very popular, so in the first scene we meet a group of spies, members of MI9, who are the secret agents of time.

“On their first day at the agency, they have their object returned to them, but then they discover they’re all going to be assassinated and the object will in some way be involved. To save their lives, they have only one chance to turn back time, which is why the play is called Once.”

Staging will be kept simple. “The brief for each group was that we would try to be light on additional production elements, so the challenge was to produce as much as possible just with the box contents and the actors,” says Jessica.

“Jenna and Paula have benches in their shows and I use some stools, but everything else has come from the boxes.”

What gifted young talents!

York Theatre Royal Youth Theatre presents Gifted, three plays in three nights, in The Studio, York Theatre Royal, tonight until Saturday.