The team behind a new play exploring the issues of war ended up risking their own lives in the name of research, Steve Pratt discovers.

THE Wedding Collective's production of a realitybased theatre piece about the Nato bombing of Serbia in 1999 was staged in the crypt of a Blitzbombed church in London.

The venue for the premiere of The Daughter, the second play in a planned trilogy about the experience of women caught up in major social or political upheaval, is more conventional - the intimate Studio Theatre space at York Theatre Royal.

Issues raised by The Daughter are as relevant and controversial as those in the company's last show, Warcrime - which was staged in a cold storage plant on the Seine, an ancient amphitheatre in Salonika, a former nuclear bomb hanger on a former American air base and inside the North Tower of the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle.

The Daughter is centred around a schoolgirl in the Holy Land, exploring such issues as resistance to occupation and suicide bombers.

Jewish writer-director Stephen Tiller and Muslim designer Nadia Lakhani, both from the East End of London, researched the play in Israel and Palestine.

"Warcrimes was based on somebody who was killed in the American cluster bomb attack in 1999, " says Teller. "Having done that, there were other issues, like the invasion of Iraq had just happened and all the stuff that's happened since with the London bombings."

The Daughter reworks Shakespeare's Measure For Measure in a contemporary setting.

"In that play there's a nun and a guy who makes an indecent proposal to her. That kind of story is more difficult to make work in the modern age. By having a Muslim girl and an Israeli policeman, we thought there might be parallels, " he says.

He and Lakhani visited Israel and Palestine to talk to people on both sides about their everyday experiences of the occupation of Palestine. They worked with a company based in Hebron and Gaza that runs a theatre training programme for young Palestinians, headed by Jackie Lubeck, an Arabic-speaking Brooklyn-born Jewess and Jan Willems, a Dutch social activist.

The play was developed through improvisation, from transcribed interviews and intensive workshops. The company emphasises that the work is deliberately non-partisan.

The research trip was "very interesting and scary, " says Teller.

"A couple of times I thought we were going to get killed because we'd gone down some road where they thought they could dodge checkpoints. Then someone told us to stop. You feel very isolated in a car with a voice coming from a pillbox, calling out in a language you don't understand."

Although the play has been put in an Israel/Palestine context, the production has multi-ethnic casting with an actor of Pakistani orgin alongside Hindu, Scottish and Irish actors.

The Studio at York is also hosting the first ever tour of Sarah Kane's controversial work Blasted, in a new interpretation by the UK's leading disabled-led theatre company Graeae. When first staged, the play was heralded as a masterpiece and condemned by one newspaper as "a disgusting feast of filth".

Director Jenny Sealey, Graeae's artistic director, says that although she'd always known about Blasted, she didn't discover the play until recently when she worked on it with two blind directors and a team of actors.

"We found the play was an ideal opportunity for Graeae. It lends itself perfectly to Graeae's pioneering use of spoken description live on stage. Kane writes both dialogue and character action to function as lines. It's like a gift, " she says.

The run of Blasted from May 911 is already sold out. Tickets for The Daughter, which runs until May 6, are available from the box office on 01904 623568.