A SCHOOLBOY has got a taste of life treading the boards after bagging a part in a national touring production of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.

Brighton 10-year-old Stanley Toyne landed the part of an abandoned child after auditioning for the epic play’s Brighton run which was staged at The Theatre Royal earlier this month. The play is staged by the Touring Consortium Theatre Company, which enjoyed colossal success staging The Railway Children at Waterloo Station in London, and will run until the end of November across British theatres.

Stanley, who attends Brighton College Prep School, said: “It was cool, I had my very own dressing room and it was awesome waiting for the show as the backstage set had a guillotine and a fake wall. It was fantastic to perform in one of the oldest theatres in England. It was really good going on stage but was quite hard pretending to be dead for five minutes!”

Stanley appeared on stage as a waif and is later run over and killed by an aristocratic coach after being trampled on by horses. He got picked for the role after casting directors asked his drama club if they had a small skinny boy who could play the part.

The keen cricketer got into acting doing drama lessons at school and attending drama club Act Brighton.

A Tale of Two Cities is set in London and Paris during the French Revolution. The novel depicts the plight of the French peasantry in the years leading up to the revolution and their later revenge on the aristocrats.It had many unflattering social parallels with life in London at that time.

Charles Dickens considered the novel the best story he had ever written. And A Tale of Two Cities is considered to be the one of the best-selling novels in the world after selling more than 200 million copies. Mike Poulton’s new dramatic adaptation set to music by Oscar-winning Rachel Portman has received rave reviews with four stars from The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Guardian.

The theatrical gene runs in Stanley’s family, as his father Simon Toyne is a successful TV producer (as well as being a bestselling author of thrillers) and his mother Kathryn also worked in theatre.

Stanley has previously appeared in BBC Radio 4’s epic new year’s eve rendition of War and Peace. He said he has been bitten by the acting bug and is considering a career as a thespian - following in the footsteps of his favourite actors Robert Downey Junior, Andrew Garfield and Arnold Schwarzenegger.