IT'S NOT easy being a teenager in 2001 - and it's not much easier being a teenager's parent. For anyone who's experienced the pain of adolescent angst directly or indirectly, Riding Lights Theatre's new touring show Love Fifteen sounds like a must.

For the past four weeks, actors and directors with the Christian theatre company's touring offshoot Roughshod have been thrashing out during rehearsals the plot of a play that deals with the difficult relationship between parents and teenagers.

They began with an idea: that they wanted to explore the tensions and difficulties parents and teenagers face. During rehearsals, they worked around that theme and the improvisations were then worked up into a script.

To make sure that they got the authentic teenage voice across, youngsters from Fulford and Joseph Rowntree schools were invited to take part in workshops.

It's a prescription, says co-director Bridget Foreman, that makes for vigorous and relevant theatre.

"The actors are not just interpreting lines," she says. "It's a very creative way to work, producing something together which has been hammered out between us."

The issues dealt with are the sort of tensions and strains that families with teenage children face. The play features a typical family - parents, grandmother, two teenage children and their friends. It is not a family in crisis dealing with major issues, Bridget stresses, but a family struggling to cope with everyday tensions. But that, she says, only makes it more relevant.

"Everybody has been brought up by parents, and there is a chance that we will all have either been parents or are likely to be," she says.

To make it even more relevant, audience members will have the chance to participate. At points during the play, the actors will pause to allow people to role-play their own solutions.

"We have given one example of how things might turn out," Bridget says. "But this is a way of getting audience members and saying this is a really tricky situation, there are a number of things the parents or children could do."

u Love Fifteen previews at the Friargate Theatre in Lower Friargate, York, on Tuesday. There will be performances on Wednesday and Thursday evening before the show goes on national tour, returning for a performance at the annual Riding Lights Summer Theatre School at the end of July.

Next week's performances all begin at 7.30pm. Tickets, priced £5-00 adults, £3-50 concessions for the preview or £7-50 adults, £5-00 concessions for the Wednesday and Thursday performances, are available from Riding Lights on 01904 655317.