Passion, conviction, dilemma and conflict - all part of the daily struggle of parenting, and the underlying themes of a new play at the Ark, the children's cultural centre in Dublin. The author of Zoe's Play, John McArdle, explains: "Parents instinctively want to give their children everything, except their freedom, because giving them their freedom means handing them over into potentially harmful situations. "We don't want to see our children hurt in any way. We want to protect them from pain, the pain of first love, all those things. But we aren't here to be safe, we're here to meet life's challenges - and I believe that children are capable of more than we allow."

McArdle is a father and a grandfather, an ex-school principal who has been writing plays for children for some 20 years now. In Zoe's Play he examines the life of a 10-year-old girl and the conflict which ensues between herself and her father when Dad decides to knock down the forest they live in, taming the surrounding wilderness so as to make a large farm and secure the family's future.

"I'd hope that children coming to the play would think about how they relate to their world around them and become aware of issues of ecology, asking themselves questions about how much we `won' the world around us and how much it is a gift to us - whether we have the right to cultivate all round us; whether we should enjoy rather than mould too much. I suppose the play examines the split in present society between science and spiritual things."

McArdle sees theatre as an ideal medium to present children with different ideas - without imposing views on them. "We spend too much time telling children what they should be," he says. "I would prefer to try to facilitate them to make their own decisions about their attitude to the world around them. It is very important to provide entertainment and I think any entertainment for children is good, but I like to go further than the cliche with children's theatre. "The experience of theatre changes people. I would like to give children a piece of theatre which opens their minds, which is a great experience in itself. When I leave a Tom Murphy play, I'm grappling with ideas, and that's the kind of experience I'd like to give children."

Martin Drury is the play's director, as well as being director of the Ark itself. "Drama is imagined reality", he says. "It is a set of `ifs' - it imagines other possibilities from the ones we know. Ideally it is 50 per cent close to us, so we can relate, and 50 per cent new, so we are not just seeing ourselves reflected back. "With Zoe's Play, the wolf and forest are invested with notions of `primitive' and `wild'. Zoe is the idealist, her father is the pragmatist. The idea of wildness is connected with her passion and defiance. "This balance between socialising children and the notion of allowing them to be free-spirited is an archetypal one. It is the one of the complexities of parenting that all parents face.

"Children and adults will be able to relate to what's going on. The adults will understand the father's perspective, but they will also see in Zoe a passion they had themselves as children. And children will see two sides of an argument written very sensitively."

In a play set in an unspecified time in the past, Zoe is an only child who lives without things like electricity or school. When she isn't helping her parents, she plays. She has a gift for imagining and making things come alive; through her play - as is the case with all play - she explores ideas and tries to make sense of the world around her.

With this piece of theatre, McArdle hopes to facilitate understanding. "Theatre has within the possibility of insight," he says. "You can't make people reach insight, but theatre can offer an experience which points towards where insight might be."

Performances of the play are followed by a discussion, led by Martin Drury. This session is largely designed to allow children to discover how a play moves from being "words on the page" to "action on the stage". "Part of our brief at the Ark is to create an awareness of how things are done," Drury says. "We tend to think of the arts in fairly superficial ways - it is good for children to see the amount of work that goes into a production. "In the discussion, we talk about the fact that there are a number of drafts for each script, how the forest is represented on the set, even the amount of thought that goes into choosing the colours on the stage. "It is a small theatre, so the whole discussion is quite intimate. It isn't just me standing there lecturing; I'll initiate conversation, but it is an opportunity for the children to ask questions and say what they thought of the show."

Zoe's Play is described as a drama about the timeless tension between work and play, between reason and imagination, between rules and freedom, between adult and child. According to Martin Drury, "this is a very important play. It is of interest to both children and adults, but the main character is a child - it is her play. "The ideas are deeply worked out, and it is an extremely sensitively written piece of work which explores children's feelings and relationships in a very serious way."

Zoe's Play is aimed at nine- to 13-year-olds. Its weekday school performances, and public performances on weekends (plus one tomorrow evening), run until March 9th. Contact the Ark (tel: (01) 670 7788).