THE harrowing real-life stories of the devastation caused by dangerous driving will be brought to life on stage with the aim of saving young lives.

This year, a record number of Safe Drive Stay Alive (SDSA) productions will be held this month for more than 23,000 students across Hampshire and the Thames Valley.

This is the 11th year that SDSA, an innovative theatre education project exploring the circumstances and consequences of road accidents, has been brought to schools and colleges.

The productions began in 2006, when just a few thousand new or pre-drivers experienced the emotive and hard-hitting presentation about the harrowing consequences of being involved in a collision.

Since then more than 150,000 young drivers have been educated by the SDSA awareness campaign project, which this year has expanded to 28 shows, educating young people as to the importance of being safe on the road.

The roduction includes a filmed scenario which shows a group of young people on a night out whose car is involved in a collision. As the on-screen drama unfolds, members of the emergency services that are featured in the film step out onto the stage.

The film is then paused while emergency service workers, parents and affected individuals talk to the audience about their real-life experiences of road collision scenes, what action they would take if the film collision was a real-life experience, the reactions of the driver and passengers, the medical implications, and how the trauma of a road collision affects them personally.

Around one-in-four deaths on the road are drivers aged 17 to 24.

Through a combination of roads policing, safety education, engineering measures and speed enforcement, Hampshire Constabulary and Thames Valley Police have seen road casualties who were killed or seriously injured fall to an all-time low by the end of 2013. But a disproportionate number of these are still young, inexperienced drivers.

Superintendent Simon Dodds, head of the joint roads policing unit for Hampshire Constabulary and Thames Valley Police, said: “Safe Drive Stay Alive is a fantastic initiative that over the years has been extremely well received by young audiences. Road death remains the biggest killer of young people in the UK, with the number of young drivers killed or seriously injured disproportionately high.

“The productions are extremely powerful and hard hard-hitting, designed to make those watching think carefully about their behaviour and attitude behind the wheel.”