BETH Sharrock is making her York Settlement Community Players debut in Marina Carr's Southern Irish family drama The Mai this week.

"Up to now I've mostly stuck to my Shakespeare comfort zone, such as Timon Of Athens and Henry V for York Shakespeare Project," says the third-year English Literature student at the University of York.

"But having done Maggie Smales's all-female Henry V, I got to hear about The Mai, and with The Mai having seven female roles and only one man, I thought it would be interesting to do this play too."

The Mai is set in 1979 when the errant Robert returns to County Offaly after five years' absence, whereupon The Mai gathers four female generations of her family at the home she has built for her estranged husband. In this house of "proud mad women", The Mai's eldest daughter, Millie, reveals the harrowing narrative of her mother's love for a man incapable of loyalty, as Carr weaves a family saga of women weighing up missed opportunities and second chances.

Beth plays Millie both as the play's 30-year-old narrator and as a 16 year old, participating in the reconstruction of the reunion summer of 1979 and the following summer, when her parents' marriage has disintegrated again.

"It's been massively challenging thinking about how I'm going to portray her when she's 16 and hopeful, but so damaged when she's 30," she says. "Obviously, I know more about being 16, and Millie at 16 runs around the stage, is very ready for everything, helpful and optimistic, but also has typical teenage mood changes. What's great about playing her at 16 years old is you get to see where this bright spark of youth she had gets diminished by her parents."

Contrast Millie at 16 with Millie at 30, "She's such a damaged, disillusioned character, and the way you play it comes down to a slower pace, where she's re-living these painful memories and she is beyond bitter," says Beth. "What you see with a 16-year-old Millie is perhaps some happy memories and some not-so-happy memories too, but at 30 Millie has closed up in her family relationships and can't even relate to her own son, but there's an openness in how she talks to the audience as the narrator.

"Though you also get a sense of the things she's not telling you and that all culminates in her last speech, which is her most haunted as her childhood memories are still troubling her."

York Settlement Community Players present The Mai, Upstage Centre, 41 Monkgate, York, tonight, 7.30pm, tomorrow, 2.30pm and 7.30pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk. Suitable for age 16 upwards.