Anyone who reads the news will have some idea of what has become of Dilworth School’s reputation in the past five years, of how the Auckland boarding school, established in 1906 to provide an education for disadvantaged boys, has been revealed as a place where hundreds of students were groomed and sexually abused by teachers, chaplains, tutors, housemasters and their associates.
It’s to the credit of The Lost Boys of Dilworth that it captures the scale and the human cost of that abuse without ever using shock for its own sake. In large part that’s because Mark Staufer, the writer and main voice of the programme, was a victim.
A broadcaster turned screenwriter, Staufer worked on the project for several years with the producer, Screentime, and for some time it wasn’t clear exactly what it would be. A documentary? A dramatic miniseries? They eventually settled on a docudrama blend, which feels a long way away from a standard current affairs documentary.
“I’m really glad that they did,” says Mary Durham. “I’ve worked as a journalist, but there was something within the story that needed to be told in a different way.”
Durham directed the interview segments of Lost Boys, working alongside Peter Burger, who directed the dramatic parts. They worked from what Burger describes as “a whole bunch of different kinds of creative ideas and stories and tendrils of stories that Mark had generated”, but with some clear rules.
“One thing that’s crucial in a docudrama is that the documentary side of it leads,” says Burger. “We’re doing truth in the case of the documentary side and on the drama side, [it’s] as close as we can get to truth. Everything on screen, we want to be able to say, ‘This is our very best version of what we understand to be the truth.’ So the drama can only ever follow the documentary.”
The two elements were built up in quite different ways. For Durham, who has previously worked on Beyond the Darklands and I Am (both “tough shows”, she says) it was a matter of “being there and listening” to her subjects, “being a vessel, I think, for them to channel what they want to say”.
Burger, meanwhile, had the complexities of casting, where the production came up with a significant win in Theo Rimmer Riley, who compellingly plays Staufer aged 8 and 9. But, he says, involving children in a story of this nature required care in itself. “There was a lot of work done by, first, our casting director and then, through all rehearsals and on set, by Bree Peters, who was the intimacy co-ordinator,” says Burger.
“We put a lot of attention on these kids having the feeling that when they came out of the experience, they’d had a good time; they did acting.
“Everyone who had to touch each other on screen, whether they were 8 years old, or 50 years old, would say, ‘Okay, so you’re allowed to touch me, here, here and here. You’re not allowed to touch me here, here and here.’ The other person would repeat that understanding.
“Those sorts of rules are set and the kid goes, ‘Great, I know what is going to happen. I know exactly where he’s going to touch me, I know where he’s never going to touch me.’ So they could feel safe and do their acting, knowing that it wasn’t going to slip into anywhere unclear.”
Rimmer Riley’s mother, Jodi Rimmer, also appears, playing Mrs Morgan, the English teacher whose classes offered Staufer a rare refuge. Her scene is immediately followed by an interview with the real Mrs Morgan, who recalls teaching a clever, restless boy.
“It’s a technique in docudrama: the drama starts a scenario and makes you ask a question: was she real? Was she an amalgamation of people? And bang, there she is,” says Burger. “If you do it the other way around, it feels much more like re-enactments, it feels a bit cheaper.”
Sixty-year-old Staufer emerges as a gifted communicator talking about the worst possible things. While most of his generation in the early 1970s were experiencing a modern, liberal education, he was trapped in an environment where abuse – physical, sexual, emotional – was systemic and pervasive, not only covered up but enabled over decades.
“You can imagine how hard it is to try to extract that story from yourself, having experienced that,” says Durham. “You’re reliving it. So I think it was a very challenging place for Mark to return to.”
There are times when Staufer can express satisfaction in his recollections – especially in finally managing to get himself expelled at the age of 16 – and others when he is vulnerable, clearly crushed by what he has to remember.
“That was his challenge to himself,” says Burger. “That’s what he wanted to do. But it’s also a credit to Mary in the interviewing process of helping him get to where he needed to be.”
The Lost Boys of Dilworth deserves to be seen and contemplated. The board of the school will presumably be doing both. Dilworth has been running a newspaper ad campaign emphasising its new principal’s commitment to “change”.
“I personally think they’re trying to front-foot this docudrama,” says Durham. “And I don’t think they like it. But you know, this is all about shining light in dark spaces. And that’s so important if true healing is to happen. You might laugh at the idea, but I think if they supported this, it would show what their intentions really are, 100%.”
The Lost Boys of Dilworth, TVNZ 1, Sunday, April 14, 8.30pm.
