A RECORD number of York Theatre Royal Youth Theatre members are taking part in The Missing Mysteries performances today and tomorrow.

Some 150 children aged 11 to 16 will be performing in six churches in the city centre, divided into groups that will present six of the nine plays “missing” from Mike Kenny’s new adaptation of the York Mystery Plays to be staged in the York Museum Gardens this summer.

Kate Plumb, the Theatre Royal’s youth theatre director, has overseen a project that began last November when she and her fellow directors started work on the plays.

Jessica Fisher’s production of Cain And Abel will open each day’s schedule at 10.30am at All Saints, Pavement; followed by Juliet Forster’s Ten Plagues at St Helen’s, St Helen’s Square, at 11.30am; Kate’s Crossing Of The Red Sea, St Denys, Walmgate, 12.30pm; Jenna Drury’s Flight Into Egypt/Baptism, St Martin’s, Coney Street, 2pm; Paul Birch’s Mortification Of Christ, Holy Trinity, Goodramgate, 3pm; and Coronation Of The Virgin, St Olave’s, Marygate, 4pm.

Each play will run for up to 40 minutes and each cast will lead the audience in a procession to the next church. Audience members can attend as many performances as they would wish on each day, and admission is free, although donations will be welcome.

Most of the performances will be adaptations that retain the old English texts with some modern refinements, although Crossing Of The Red Sea is a new script. “It’s an entirely fresh piece written by me and York performance poet Henry Raby, who’s doing the Royal Court Young Writers’ programme at the moment,” says Kate, who will be involved in the summer Mystery Plays production too, directing 100 children aged two to 16 in her capacity as young people’s director.

The youth theatre members have been working on The Missing Mysteries since January. “They began by analysing what they felt was relevant in the plays to them today,” says Kate. “For Crossing Of The Red Sea, for example, they wanted to look at issue of refugees and having to leave your own country, while Jenna’s play, Flight To Egypt, is taking place in St Martin’s, which was bombed in the Second World War, so the group wanted to reflect on that.”

Ensemble member Lou Sophocleous explains how her group studied Cain And Abel. “We’ve been looking at sibling rivalry and how one incident like that can then carry on through the generations, and we also talked about the gossip and hearsay that goes with such events,” she says.

In addition to The Missing Mysteries, 80 Theatre Royal Youth Theatre members aged eight to ten have recorded a series of four-minute Mysteries radio plays, written by Jenna Drury, Nicolette Hobson, Shona Cowie and Paula Clark and recorded by York St John University student James Gardiacabel. These will be aired at today and tomorrow’s performances and on York Hospital Radio and can be heard via the Mystery Plays website too.

Farther afield, meanwhile, Kate Plumb and Henry Raby’s script for Crossing Of The Red Sea will be performed in Kenya. Kate’s friend, Rhiannon Lawton, who formerly lived in Pickering, now teaches at St Andrew’s School in Turi, near Nairobi, where the children will present it.

“I went to visit Rhiannon in January, when she happened to be looking for a play to do in her school, so she’s now taking our Missing Mysteries piece to Kenya! It was just one of those lovely fluky things.”