Mark Fisher glimpses a dramatic future through the eyes of young people from three nations. AS the professional theatre takes its annual deep breath before trucking into Edinburgh, the world of youth theatre once again emerges to fill the vacuum. Everywhere you look - Glasgow, Livingston, St Andrews - young people are making the most of the Scottish summer and hiding themselves away in darkened rehearsal rooms.

The season's most ambitious project, Millennium: Angels of Paris, takes to the stage of His Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen, next week, the result of a 15-month programme involving young people from Scotland, France, and Belarus.

In what looks to be a major missed opportunity, the play is not a part of this week's Aberdeen International Youth Festival, an event which has a pitiful Scottish component. Instead it is the product of the dynamic Aberdeen Arts Centre, chivvied along by Shona Powell from the equally dynamic Lemon Tree, and encouraged by Robert Robson of His Majesty's Theatre.

Prime mover is the arts centre's Tina West, about to reach the end of her three-year tenure as the city's drama artist in residence, who has spent the past 15 months liaising with Clermont-Ferrand in France and Gomel in Belarus (both twin towns with Aberdeen), working out how to create a universally relevant play in three languages for a cast of 45. Then, how to make an #86,000 budget, half of which will go on accommodation, stretch to match her ambitions.

``I was disappointed with the theatre work that was being put into the international youth festival, it seemed very rigid,'' says West. ``I was surprised that there wasn't any Scottish representation in an international festival that happens in Aberdeen every year. So we took our idea to the board and they just didn't want it - they thought it was too experimental and who would want to listen to something in Russian anyway?''

Undaunted, West and her colleagues decided to press on with the project regardless, the director heading out to Gomel in May 1995 to run workshops exploring themes that affected the young people there. Next on board was playwright Henry Adam, an emerging name on the writing scene having contributed both to the Lemon Tree's Playfest 96 and the Traverse's Theatre's Sharp Shorts compilation, as well as winning the Mobil Scottish Playwriting Competition for The Abattoir. He travelled to Gomel in November and to the Clermont-Ferrand Conservatoire in December; his task to create a play that reflected the divergent interests and concerns of the three national groups. Its language, in case you are worried, is 70% English.

``From the Belarussian experience it's about how the generation from the former Soviet Union don't accept the younger generation's viewpoint,'' says West. ``The drama director out there said it was a big issue and she didn't see how it was going to be resolved. I went to France in December and we talked about their politics, and they were very different. We thought our kids from Aberdeen were politically apathetic. The Belarussians I would say were politically naive, and the French were politically aware. That was why we decided to set the play in France.''

The result is an ambitious drama set in Paris in the last few days of 1999, where a self-serving political elite has agreed to the formation of a single European state. Partly inspired by Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, it's a satire on consumerism and the clash of cultural values between East and West, that looks at a society preparing for the biggest party in the world, while the incidence of supernatural events begins to escalate.

Directed jointly by West, Josefa Jeunet from France, and Tamara Shehktman from Belarus, the show takes a look at the future ``through the eyes of the people who will be instrumental in creating it''. Each director has brought her own style and, far from causing artistic conflict, the combination appears to be working a treat.

``I can't tell you how extraordinarily harmonic it is,'' says West. ``I don't know if it's because it's three women directors or because we're all coming from the same energy point, but we really haven't had problems. We did a run of the first half and we were all taking separate notes and when we came together we realised we'd made the same notes.''

Strategic planning before this point was not always so easy. Dealings with Gomel were particularly fraught. Under the leadership of President Lukashenko, a career Communist bureaucrat who once tore up his ballot paper in contempt for the democratic system and has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler, Belarus is not the most liberal of places. Stories of civil rights abuses are legion. In April, a march of up to 60,000 people commemorating the tenth anniversary of Chernobyl was violently interrupted by government forces. Over 200 arrests were made and it is alleged that trials took place not in the courts but in the prison cells.

For themselves, the Belarussian actors from School No 61, who began workshops at the time of the elections when it looked like the Communists might return to power, were caught between the nationalists, who were keen to serialise the script of Millennium: Angels of Paris in a national newspaper, and the old-style Soviets who didn't - on the grounds that they considered it subversive.

Much videoing, faxing, e-mailing, and phoning later, the three national groups, whose ages range from 15-26, came together in Aberdeen at the start of July and are getting on famously. ``They're all managing amazingly well,'' says West. ``It's a huge project to do, but they've all taken to it because they believe in it and they have ownership of it. The characters are all very near to them, because at some point or other in the process they've created them. They're having a brilliant time.''

n Millennium: Angels of Paris is at His Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen, August 15-17.