IN response to York Theatre Royal's homecoming after a year on the other side of the tracks at the National Railway Museum, the week-long TakeOver Festival took the theme of home.

"Our programme looks at how home is ever present within our everyday life, the importance of remembering one's roots and embarking on new beginnings" wrote festival artistic director Lizzy Whynes in her introductory notes. "Our festival welcomes the inquisitive, the adventurous and the imaginative. Within the programme, the festival is opening doors for audiences to catch five new brand new pieces of theatre, three of which are premieres."

Under the TakeOver template, pioneered in York and now to be rolled out at theatres elsewhere, the running of the Theatre Royal is "taken over" by a team of 12 to 26 year olds, but that does not mean it is exclusively a festival for young people. As if to emphasise the point, the first premiere last Tuesday and Wednesday, was written by Don Walls, the doyen of York poets at 86, whose debut verse play, The Beggars Of York, addressed the issue of homelessness and social care in York.

Written in response to his late son Peter's 30 years on York's streets, walking the tightrope between busking and begging while in thrall to schizophrenia, it was presented by Joshua Goodman's cast of five in the Studio in a series of short scenes, linear in construction but stocked with Walls's compassion, social concern, shards of humour, wise words, anger and desire for change.

His most intriguing character, played with dark-eyed intensity and yet a floating presence in hoodie and trackie bottoms by the ever impressive Hannah Davies, was a one-woman Greek chorus, able to walk and talk unseen on street and courtroom floor alike, saying what should be said but no-one dares say.

Whynes's short play from last year's TakeOver at the NRM, Coal in The Garden, was reprised in the Studio at Friday lunchtime with its theme of childhood stories of home or home from home in the case of a wartime evacuee, as part of Memories Of Coal.

This was newly teamed with a delightful video documentary of childhood recollections by York's elderly residents, which in turn spurned a further community project, wherein Dunnington Primary School presented a theatre piece that considered how childhood had changed. Yes, they liked playing with their tablets, but they still liked playing outdoors too.

The festival stepped outside its Theatre Royal home and into the Museum Gardens on Saturday for Zest Theatre's Boy Meets Girl, a fast-moving fusion of physical theatre, music and dance wherein the audience were issued with headphones to follow the innermost thoughts of either Boy and Girl, in pursuit of love, and then hearing the other protagonist's experience in a second performance. Hearts were giddy with the romance of this short-lived summer of love by its end.

The festival concluded in the Studio on Sunday evening, this time in the setting of a care home, where the young people of Charlotte Coles's York Theatre Royal Youth Theatre cast played old people in an touching short new play by York playwright Mike Kenny about memory, loss of memory and dementia, where you are never too old to be young at heart. Gentle in its humour, understanding and insight, The Forgetting was enchantingly performed and supremely well written. A gem of a finale.