Twenty-five years after seven excluded teenagers created a play with a Bournemouth community arts charity, four original participants have reunited at their former Dorchester school. The project, which transformed pupils once labelled troubled into international performers, has now been documented in a book.
When a group of boys excluded from mainstream education were invited to create and perform a production in 2001, none of them anticipated how it would reshape their trajectories. Seven pupils at the former Penwithen School in Dorchester collaborated with the Bournemouth community arts charity Vita Nova on a project that eventually traveled to schools, universities, and a European arts festival in Latvia. More than two decades later, four of those original participants have reunited, bringing the story of their unorthodox troupe back to the grounds where it began.
From Behavioral Difficulties in Dorchester to the Bournemouth Stage
Penwithen School closed in 2005, but during the early 2000s, it operated as a residential special school for children with behavioral difficulties. Dan Stanaway, one of the cast members who returned for the reunion, reflected on his arrival at the institution after being barred from mainstream facilities across the region.
“I was a naughty child. I got excluded from pretty much every school in the Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch area so they sent me here.”
Life-Changing Play: 25 Years Later, Cast Reunites and Reflects
Dan Stanaway, original participant
The collaborative breakthrough arrived when Vita Nova brought a different production focused on drug addiction to the school. The cast members of that touring show were themselves in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. Their lived experiences resonated so deeply with the residential pupils that Eileen Clews, a teacher at Penwithen, contacted project leader Sharon Coyne with an ambitious proposal to make a play with the young men there.
That recommendation launched weekly journeys for an unconventional troupe traveling from their Dorchester school to the Bournemouth Centre for Community Arts in Boscombe. Coyne recalled the raw composition of the group, noting that one of the group was an attempted murderer among participants who were out there.
Co-Creating Til It All Went Wrong and Touring Internationally
The ensemble ultimately developed Til It All Went Wrong, a production drawn directly from their own realities. Stanaway and his peers built the script around subjects they knew intimately, including basically real things that happened in our lives, gangsta rap, shoplifting, fighting, taking drugs.
The tour took the young performers back into the very institutions that had previously excluded them, as well as an international social inclusion conference hosted at the University of Exeter. The project’s most expansive milestone was an invitation to a European arts festival in Riga, Latvia.
“They were trusting us to go into schools and show them that we’re not bad kids, we’ve just got problems and look what we can do if you just give us that voice. I’d never left the country before. The passport that they got for me to go to Riga was the passport to join the army.”
Dan Stanaway, original participant
An Accidental Reunion and a Book Documenting the Journey
Years later, while Coyne was pursuing a PhD centered on social inclusion, she wondered what had become of her former cast members. She was procrastinating on her search when Stanaway unexpectedly arrived at her doorstep to fit her new oven. Her husband called her immediately to announce the coincidence.
Coyne has since documented the Penwithen narrative in a book titled Theatre of the Lost and Found. Another member of the original group, David Bishop, offered a stark assessment of how the project altered his trajectory away from adversity.
“I was going down a slippery slope. I’ve proved everyone wrong. I’ve actually taken a straight and sensible path.”
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Marina is a celebrated pop culture columnist and recipient of multiple media awards. She curates engaging stories about film, music, television, and celebrity news, always with a fresh and authoritative voice.
