BELT Up Theatre, the cutting-edge York theatre company, believes the TakeOver 09 Festival is a godsend for such work.

“I think it’s a really wonderful idea and very worthy of a lot of attention,” says Belt Up’s Alex Wright, whose company is performing experimental interpretations of Moliere’s The Tartuffe and Kafka’s The Trial at the inaugural young people’s festival fresh from the Edinburgh Fringe.

“Over the last few years we’ve been trying to put our work on, but it’s always been difficult to find venues, especially when we were still at university in York, where we had to work around term time.

“And because we’re relatively unknown, there’s nowhere that allows you to do things that are amazing or allows you to fail, but the Theatre Royal has been brilliant to us.”

James Wilkes’s adaptation of The Tartuffe, with its chaotic cacophony of clowns, mime artists, actors and low-tech effects, swaps the Edinburgh underground for a traditional 800-seat theatre tonight.

“Our attitude is, this troupe of actors has done well in Edinburgh; now what will they do in a proscenium-arch theatre? They’ll still respond to the theatre space, but this time it’s a conventional one, and whereas we had one actor for every five audience members in Edinburgh, now it could be one to 70, so it’ll require different skills, such as a big voice,” he says.

Dominic J Allen’s new adaptation of The Trial will take TakeOver09 out of the Theatre Royal, but where to? “I think it’ll be at York St John’s but it’s a top-secret location, so secret that I haven’t seen it yet,” he says.

Belt Up Theatre presents The Tartuffe tonight at 7.30pm at York Theatre Royal and The Trial from Wednesday to Friday at 7.30pm at…wait and see.