The Aberdeen schoolboy who went to ballet class in his football shorts now dancing with Matthew Bourne

“I hated it,” he remembers. “I went to one class in my football shorts, and I left it, hating it. I said to my dad that I was never going back, but I did.”

Months later, he was selected as one of ten boys with no professional dance experience to perform in a production of William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies, produced by iconic choreographer Matthew Bourne.

Now, 12 years later, he is a dancer in Bourne’s innovative ballet company New Adventures, with which he has toured the world in Swan Lake, The Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty - and is set to take to the stage in The Red Shoes in Edinburgh next month.

“I did what you would call an after school club kind of dancing, once a week,” he says. “It wasn’t vocational, I didn’t take it too seriously, it was a hobby. Then I saw an advert saying they were looking for young boys to be part of this Lord the Flies project.

“it's a lot more accepted now, but even when I went to school, it was a big ‘no no’ to do ballet. It was football or rugby. So I went to hip hop because it was felt that was an acceptable form of dance for a guy.”

A teacher at the hip hop class had suggested to Flynn’s parents that he try classical ballet. Even though the first class had not gone well, he decided to give it a second chance.

Once he saw other men performing professionally in Lord of the Flies, he realised he wanted to dance as a career.

“As soon as I saw the professional boys dancing full time [in Lord of the Flies]. I just went, ‘yeah, this is exactly what I want to do’. And if I'm honest, I haven't stopped since. I almost gave myself no other option, I just said, ‘This is it’.

“Coming from Aberdeen, at a local dance school, it is 90 per cent, if not 95 per cent, girls. All the pictures around the studios is all tutus and ballerinas. So that was the first environment when I could see myself in these professionals.”

First performed in 2011 at the Theatre Royal Glasgow by dance company New Adventures, Lord of the Flies used a cast of eight professional dancers and 15 boys and young men from Glasgow.

The production was such a success, it went on to tour other UK theatres, casting local boys in each show.

The audition, at The Lemon Tree in Aberdeen, attracted hundreds of applicants. But Flynn does not remember it as a stressful experience.

“They identified who had a bit of stage presence, a bit of musicality, you know. But I remember doing fun things like chants and games,” he says. “It was an amazing project.”

After finishing Lord of the Flies, Flynn continued his dance training and went on to the Lane Theatre Arts in London, where Bourne kept in touch, offering him a role in his Romeo and Juliet production after graduation.

The Red Shoes is to be performed at the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh from 14 to 18 April.