A TRIP to see Dame Berwick Kaler in pantomime at York sparked off Luke Adamson's interest in acting. "I said that looked like fun, I'd like to do something like that," he recalls.

"The next year they advertised auditions for the children's parts and my mum forced me to go along. I loved it, got in and had a small speaking part. I went back the following year and had another speaking part."

He's now back on the Theatre Royal stage in a revival of one of Alan Bennett's lesser-seen plays, Enjoy.

Alongside youth is experience in the form of Tina Gray, who was first directed by artistic director Damian Cruden in another Bennett play, Habeus Corpus, ten years ago. She arrives from appearing in the Yorkshire writer's latest play, The History Boys, for the National Theatre.

Enjoy, first staged in London in 1980 with Joan Plowright and Colin Blakely heading the cast, follows Wilf and Connie Craven, who live in a back-to-back in Leeds. The play's described as "a Bennett for the Big Brother age".

Gray plays a woman "who has some pretensions to refinement", a phrase which perfectly sums up her character. Adamson, 18, is local thug Anthony whose arrival with a copy of an adult magazine uncovers shocking family secrets.

He's had his hair shaved off for the role. "I'm pleased. I hate my hair, I can't do anything with it," he says.

He previously appeared in Cruden's production of Brassed Off at The Theatre Royal and has just finished doing that play again with an amateur group in York.

Adamson, from Selby, is currently applying for drama school, having decided he wants to make acting his career. "This is all I can do, I'm useless at anything else. I'm not very good at any physical work. I thought I might be a teacher like my dad, but I hate children," he says.

The role he's enjoyed most was playing Adrian Mole on stage at York Grand Opera House a couple of years ago. "It was one of the most fantastic experiences to play a character everyone knows and to go in and put your own spin on it," he says.

Gray is a Bennett fan. As a writer, she finds him "breathtakingly real", adding, "Like Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare, you can't afford to say one word wrong. What he's written is perfect and, of course, it's very funny. It makes you laugh, makes you cry."

She's from Scotland and was sent to elocution lessons "because I got teased at school for my wee Fife accent". Seeing the first Peter Pan production after the war led to her telling her mother in the interval "I want to be up there".

She finally got her wish to fly on stage like Peter when she starred in a production of A Passionate Woman, in which her character exits in a hot air balloon high above the stage.

"You really have to be passionate about what you do because an actor's life is not so wonderful, you don't work all the time and have to face rejection,"

she says.

She first worked at York Theatre Royal for a previous artistic director John Doyle in Charley's Aunt, Bedroom Farce and, surprisingly, King Duncan in Macbeth.

"He's usually a doddery old man but I was a sovereign in full regalia. That was very exciting.

When you leave drama school, you think of all the parts you want to play in your career and that wasn't on the list," she says.

* Enjoy: York Theatre Royal, until November 24. Tickets 01904-623568 or online at www.yorktheatreroyal.co.uk Steve Pratt