TO many young women, still being mistaken for a teenager is not always a well received compliment but for East Lancashire's newest actress on the scene, Jenna Southworth, it has become something of an advantage.

Her youthful looks have become her favourite quality, landing her a role to play the part of a child in a professional play just months after graduating.

Barrowford-born Jenna, 23, plays a 10-year-old in the Bolton Octagon's performance of The Crucible, which starts next week and runs until March 1.

"I look really young in the part. I even have to wear a sports bra. Normally my casting is about 16 to early 20s so this is a real challenge for me. I used to hate looking younger than my age and got really annoyed being asked for ID, especially if I had left it at home. But now I'm beginning to like it. It seems to have helped me in acting so far."

The play, directed by Mark Babych, is one of the theatre's 40th anniversary season performances. It is based on the incredible story of the 1662 witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, referred to by Miller as "one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history". When it was written, Miller drew obvious parallels with Senator McCarthy's anti-Communist "witch-hunts" of the 1950s, during which Miller faced prison for not denouncing his friends.

Jenna plays Betty, who has been scared into a mental coma at the terror of witchcraft. The play opens inside the house of the Rev Samuel Parris. His house is dark and sparsely furnished. He kneels beside a bed, and prays for Betty, who appears lifeless.

The role is Jenna's first big theatre part since she graduated from The University of Salford last summer after studying drama. She fought off competition from dozens of others and landed the part, the last one to be cast, at the last minute.

And while this is her first major theatre part since leaving university, where she appeared in a string of productions, Jenna has also already made her screen debut in a BBC Afternoon play called Johnny Shakespeare.

Jenna hopes to make it big and follow in the footsteps of her idol, Sarah Lancashire, who shot to fame as Raquel Watts in Coronation Street. But acting was not Jenna's first love, as she was originally going to study law. She was intended to go to college and sit academic A-levels and at one point began training to be a journalist but none of it felt right.

Jenna said: "Nothing got my attention and then I found acting. It made me so happy. My parents weren't that happy at first that I wasn't doing what I had always intended and going down a more academic route, but I tried it and it just wasn't what I wanted to do. I didn't enjoy it at all.

"The funny thing is, though, I think I'm always going to want to be quite normal. I'd like to make it like Sarah Lancashire but it would be brilliant if I could work 9am until 5pm and then go home to my own family with a couple of children. I wonder if that life exists."

  • The Crucible - Bolton Octagon January 31 to March. Box Office 01204 520661.