PILOT Theatre Company likes to break boundaries with its educational theatre.

Author Melvin Burgess takes his sword of a pen to the heart of teenage morals.

Perhaps it was inevitable their paths would collide one day, and that day has arrived with Pilot's stage premiere of Burgess's Bloodtide, which opened at York Theatre Royal last night.

Artistic director Marcus Romer was determined to work with Britain's most controversial writer of children's fiction. "We got hold of the rights about three years ago because competition is really fierce and harsh, and because Melvin Burgess's fiction is very much in our audience target area. Young people read JK Rowling, then Phillip Pullman, and then they read Melvin Burgess," he says.

"When I went to meet him it was very apparent that his ethos and our ethos were so close it was spooky."

So much so that Burgess has since become a patron of Pilot.

Marcus was attracted to Bloodtide by the universality of its story of a 14-year-old girl marrying the head of a rival family to bring about peace. Its roots lie in Norse legend but it is redolent too of Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet and Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner.

"The Norse story of the Volsung Saga inspired Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings, Blade Runner and we believe it inspired Wagner's Ring cycle too. It's that thing of epic drama and families at war, and we wanted to give that a modern context that would allow us to create a world just like cinema does," says Marcus.

"We go to the cinema to watch X-Men, Alien, the Matrix movies and The Lord Of The Rings which take us into other worlds, and we thought 'Why not take theatre into a new realm?'.

"That's what gets me out of bed every day. One day I might want to do a drawing-room drama but right now there aren't many bonnets in a Pilot show."

Instead Pilot's production will draw on recent cataclysmic events.

"We're setting it post 9/11 and the Iraqi war, a generation away in 2027, in a world where people are surviving in structures such as ancient clans, a world that is more polarised than ever. We're saying 'How did the world get to be like this?'."

Marcus sees a link between past Pilot productions such as Lord Of The Flies and Rumblefish, and its latest touring production, Bloodtide.

"It's been said to me that we keep telling the same story! It's true that all these plays are about how young people deal with adversity in extreme circumstances, and I'm constantly drawn to those epic stories. With Bloodtide there's a lot of hope to that story."

Once more, Pilot is living up to its pioneering name.

"We go where no other company goes," says Marcus. "Uncharted waters are far more exciting than public swimming pools."

Pilot Theatre Company's Bloodtide is running at York Theatre Royal until February 21. Box office: 01904 623568.

Updated: 09:30 Friday, February 13, 2004