Over the past four years, the sequence of theatre, educational drama and theatre-in-education designed by the TAG Theatre Company to raise political awareness has probably been the most complex and sustained event in the history of young people’s theatre in Scotland, possibly even in the UK.

Under the umbrella title of Making the Nation, more than 16,000 seven to 21-year-olds have been involved in a programme of theatre and drama that has ranged in time from classical Greece to the immediate future, and in place from primary classrooms to the debating chamber of the Scottish Parliament.

This inspirational project ends this summer with a celebration of European youth arts and culture, but this month the concluding acts have involved secondary pupils, MSPs and leading national policy-makers in a programme devised to vitalise the complete political process, from the individual’s first impulse of concern with a local event to the point of actually making changes at a national level.

In the first phase of this two-part Making Changes project, TAG worked for six weeks with more than 700 pupils from 30 schools in Dumfries and Galloway, Clackmannanshire, North Ayrshire, Fife, Dundee and Glasgow, each school sending a group to spend a day with a team of actorsleaders. It began with a questionnaire and ended six hours later with a non-directed opportunity to contemplate the growth of their understanding. In between was a subtly-devised experience that seamlessly employed all the skills of theatre and drama to explore cause and effect, right and wrong, in community interaction.

It was subtle because it had been a long time in the making. Director James Brining remembers hearing a news item last July about the destruction of a radio mast in Cyprus. Straight away he knew that this was the idea he needed: something that involved a whole community, something of local, national and even global resonance, something where science and instinct are at loggerheads. Together, he and TAG education director Carol Healas elaborated the physical, emotional and moral landscape into which they would lead the students.

It began and ended in an art gallery preparing an exhibition of found art: portraits, actualities and mystery objects. In their first visit, the pupils were invited to browse, suggest titles and, in the case of the portraits, speculate about the sitters. All these items were later used in the dramatic structure: Brining knows them as “holding forms”, artefacts that attract an emotional charge and become “dramatic batteries” that can energise the participants. At the end of a long day of listening and watching, reacting and responding, the pupils revisited the gallery objects and were reminded of the day’s odyssey.

Tracey Sloan, an English teacher at Bannerman High in Glasgow, was quietly rapturous as she watched her S3 pupils interact with the TAG players. “We brought the more mature and intelligent pupils, who do drama and debating, because TAG are unique in the way they make issues real. And now, look at them! They’re living it. They warmed to the idea, and now they are finding voices themselves. So many of them feel themselves involved.”

For the second phase, each of the 30 schools could send two pupils to the three-day congress held at the Hub in Edinburgh. Much of the first day was taken up with reflection on the radio mast day, with workshops built around the question of how far you would go to defend your beliefs.

At the buffet reception that evening, there was more consolidation, with Mr Brining showing the radio mast video, and Hazel Lipton, the principal teacher of drama at Dumfries Academy, articulating the sensation of committing oneself to an imaginative collective. There was also the first meeting with MSPs. Mike Watson spoke of the importance of the arts in education and of TAG’s value in giving esteem to young people, not least by making their voices heard.

On the second day, the congress went to the visitors’ gallery of the Scottish Parliament to watch their MSPs at work in general question time and First Minister’s question time. The pupils’ reactions to the noisy sessions were mixed, ranging from “amazed” and “brilliant”, through “a clown court” to anger at perceived obstructive behaviour. Perhaps it was the drama context of the congress that made some recognise the play-acting.

In the morning session, TAG had invited non-governmental policy-makers to lead a workshop on independent action. Representatives of the Scottish Youth Parliament, the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Faslane, and the Carbeth Hutters (the north of Glasgow tenants who are in dispute with their landlord) described experiences akin to the fiction developed around the radio mast incident. The question of how far you would go to defend your beliefs was asked again, this time with reference to the 14-year-old Kurdish girl who had set herself on fire in protest against the treatment of her people.

After a night at the Traverse and a post-play discussion with the cast and author, the congress gathered on the final morning to quiz a panel of six MSPs about the age of consent, tobacco and alcohol buying, franchise and legal liability.

The MSPs’ responses were generally progressive and libertarian. Irene McGugan, MSP for North-east Scotland, who has a role in creating a children’s commissioner for Scotland, advocates wider decriminalisation and testing of drugs to break the power of drug dealers.

Hugh Kerr, standing in for Glasgow MSP Tommy Sheridan, wants more and better sex education to try to decrease the UK’s teenage pregnancy rate. He also supports democracy in schools, with school councils having budgets and executive powers, as part of the drive to politicise Scotland.

George Reid, MSP for Mid-Scotland and Fife, caught the mood of the meeting in his closing words: “Power to young people!” and urging the pupils to take ideas back to their schools and keep their mouths open, to help Scotland develop its democracy.

The teachers’ only problem then was persuading them to go home.