"I don’t know why, but the teacher decided it would be a good idea for the class to go off and rehearse it in the shelter shed, as they called them.
"I don’t think she was too worried about it, as long as we didn’t actually build a guillotine."
At the time, he had no idea he would go on to become a respected theatre studies lecturer and, least of all, made an emeritus professor for his contributions to the subject at the University of Otago over the past 18 years.
Despite his love of theatre, his journey to theatre stardom had many hurdles along the way.
He attended a "typical" boys’ secondary school, which did not provide much in the way of theatre experience.
"And because of my vintage, theatre studies wasn’t really established as a subject that you could pursue as a major qualification in New Zealand when I was studying.
"So I studied Russian and French at Victoria University, and I was quite fortunate because through both of those subjects, I was able to do quite a lot of drama and theatre."
He said it was a good way for students to immerse themselves in the French and Russian languages, so they were encouraged to do it by their lecturers.
"It was great because it helped us to speak them conversationally, rather than just academically."
After that, he completed a PhD on Russian playwright Anton Chekhov at the University of Cambridge, in England, before teaching drama within the University of Auckland English department.
While he was there, he established the theatre studies programme.
The director, playwright and dramaturg then made the move to Dunedin, where he was appointed head of the University of Otago theatre studies department.
He made an outstanding contribution to the department through research, teaching and collaboration across many theatre communities.
At the forefront of his research and teaching was verbatim theatre — creating plays from the words of real people on a particular topic, and editing the material to structure it into a dramatic form, with actors presenting the original testimony verbatim.
He took interest in the form after seeing several verbatim plays and was able to take a research trip to the United Kingdom, where he studied it much more detail.
Prof Young has produced and directed four verbatim plays with the university and Talking House, a Dunedin company whose ethos is community-based theatre. Three of the plays have been on national tours — Hush, about family violence; Be Longing, about migrants; and The Keys are in the Margarine, about dementia.
He and his collaborators have also developed a "signature style" of verbatim theatre performance called "headphone verbatim", where actors not only repeat the words, but the way they are said, the hesitation, the ungrammatical syntax, the body language and individual mannerisms.
"It’s paradoxical, because on the one hand, the actors don’t have any opportunity to create a character — they’re kind of an avatar — but it reveals a lot about acting because it makes you think about the tool box of things that you draw on when acting.
"Actors often resort to fairly stereotypical or predictable gestures, but our students come up with gestures that no-one would ever imagine."
Prof Young retired earlier this month and plans to finish writing his book on the development of verbatim and documentary theatre.
He is also continuing to work with some other Dunedin theatre makers on a production of Samuel Beckett’s novella Company.
There would be some other playwrighting projects in the pipeline as well, he said.
