All the world's a stage for 5-minute iPlayers

In what has been hailed as a landmark event in the country's cultural life, Scotland's national theatre last night launched its ambitious Five Minute Theatre project.

Staged not only in theatres, but in unlikely places across 11 countries, including caves, farmyards, and hotel bedrooms, the vast initiative will see 235 individual plays performed on a rolling basis over a 24-hour period.

The formidable project will make use of some pre-recorded productions, but more than 100 will be filmed live in front of audiences and broadcast online.

Described as being "created by anyone for a worldwide audience of everyone", the scheme forms part of celebrations for the fifth birthday of the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS), and has fused together arts enthusiasts and ordinary Scots to produce a dizzying array of work.

The diverse roll call of individuals who make up the many casts and crews are aged between five and 70, and come from across the globe.

Whereas some of the participants are noted thespians, such as veteran actors Alison Peebles and Tam Dean Burn, others such as primary school pupils and young mothers have scant experience of a life treading the boards.

The topics and subjects of the plays - some of which are being performed in Gaelic and sign language - are no less varied, including productions exploring a fictional wedding night in Scotland after the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, a conversation between a paperboy and a cow he meets on his round, and a tale about time travel involving two Glaswegian pensioners on mobility scooters.

Some of the shows will be filmed in Paraguay, China, India, Mexico, Italy and the US.

However, the majority will be performed in Scotland, with 14 recorded live and streamed online from Glasgow's Centre for Contemporary Arts, eight from The Lemon Tree in Aberdeen, and seven from Edinburgh's Adam House Theatre.

In addition, eight roving camera crews will be deployed across Glasgow, Edinburgh, Perth, Ayr, Haddington and Livingston to capture the action in other locations.

The first production, the suitably named The Gods Are Watching, got under way at 5pm yesterday evening at Perth Theatre, attracting nearly 200 viewers on the NTS website.

The five-minute play by Horsecross Arts, based on the legend of a barmaid's ghost which is said to stalk the historic theatre, was quickly followed by eight other productions in the first hour of the evening.

At 5pm this evening, a production of Lawrence Clark's Shutdown is due to bring the Herculean artistic and technical endeavour to an end.After several months of planning, organisers of the enterprising initiative said yesterday it was "amazing" to finally begin broadcasting the day of live performances, and expressed confidence that the experience would encourage actors, writers and directors to reassess what is meant by theatre.

Marianne Maxwell, Five Minute Theatre's project co-ordinator, said: "I can't believe the day has come already. I remember there was a countdown timer on our website and it started at something like 94 days.

"The beauty of this project is that people have really ambitious ideas, and so it is up to us to meet their ambition with the technology - somewhere in the middle they will meet and that is what we will broadcast."

While around 7,000 people will watch the plays in person, the audience is expected to be far greater online, and Ms Maxwell said the NTS is thrilled by the way the internet allows it to reach new people.

"We don't know what the audience online will be, but we've bought the biggest capacity that we can for the live streams, and we're going to track the figures as we go along," she explained.

• To see the productions being streamed live go to www.fiveminutetheatre.com.