Ed Hall: Shakespeare as yoof like it

In a chilly rehearsal room in Brixton, south London, director Ed Hall is putting his all-male cast of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice through their paces in a prison setting. Denmark's a prison, sure, but Venice? It's all part of a scheme to liven up the Bard.

It's also part of a wider government campaign to put Shakespeare at the centre of the nation's education system. Hall's Propeller company, currently the hottest small touring fit-up in Britain, with a growing reputation in Europe (they're very big in Italy and Germany) as well as in New York and – any moment now – Tokyo is in the vanguard of this operation.

Hall has been called up by Cabinet minister Ed Balls's Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) to take the good news of Shakespeare specifically into areas where other theatrical activities don't reach. The initiative has been in operation all year as a pilot, with a budget of £1m, targeting 10 local authorities around the country. The DCSF, working with the Arts Council, arranged free Shakespeare shows and free transport for children in Year 9 (aged 13 to 15).

The Arts Council, through Roger Chapman, the National Theatre's former Head of Touring, approached Propeller to modify its existing production of A Midsummer Night's Dream into a 60-minute format for the purpose. Propeller was formed by Ed Hall in 1997 at the intimate, informal Watermill Theatre in Newbury, Berkshire, and immediately made a reputation for clarity and accessibility with a Henry V presented as a choric flashback by a group of squaddies who had followed their leader to the Battle of Agincourt.

Since then, they have presented all-male versions on a shoestring, to uniform critical praise, of many of the plays, most notably the Wars of the Roses history plays billed under the generic title of Rose Rage. While pursuing a successful freelance career elsewhere with the National and the RSC (which Hall's father, Peter, founded in 1960) and also in the West End, Hall continues with his pioneering troupe at the core of his activity.

Because the Government and Ed Balls's education minister, Jim Knight, have identified Shakespeare in schools as a main plank in its policy, the work of Propeller strikes a chord at a time when too much emphasis is laid on examination results. Ed Balls and Jim Knight are probably concerned this week – well, they should be – over reports from the RSC that half of teachers on their practical courses designed to enthuse pupils about Shakespeare have cancelled since SATs for 14 year-olds in English and maths were scrapped last month.

The DCSF has invested a modest £1m so far in this Shakespeare Live project – in which, incidentally, the RSC has participated along with Propeller as well as the Halifax-based Northern Broadsides and the Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park – and might well be advised to repair the damage by extending this scheme to form part of the schools' curriculum.

Hall has no qualms about tailoring his company's output to meet the demands of government or the appetite in schools. "Over the next six months, once this new Merchant tour is on the road, we might well do another 60-minute Dream, or Twelfth Night or Shrew with another six-man company working alongside the larger group. There is a pool of 30 actors I can call on, and it's essential our theatre work maintains its energy by addressing the most important audience of all, the young."

So, in 10 days' time, Hall and his Propeller operators will present a meaty extract of his 60-minute version of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Arts Council's headquarters in Westminster for the benefit of Ed Balls and Jim Knight, as well as the head honchos of the leading subsidising bodies. The aim is to convince them of the necessity of building on the success of this year's Shakespeare Live pilot project in which over 20,000 schoolchildren across the country had free access to Shakespeare.

According to an independent monitoring process, 85 per cent of those children, most of whom had never been to a theatre before, say they would like to see another Shakespeare play. Roger Chapman says that the response has exceeded even their own optimistic expectations, and he envisages a much bigger-scale scheme possibly in 2010.

These children's first theatre visit might well be their last, unless inspired by a production such as Propeller's Dream. I saw the 60-minute Dream last month in a medieval barn attached to a Cistercian abbey in Coggeshall, Essex, an ideal setting for the play. It was a rustic riot, with the six actors playing all the roles and recruiting Theseus and Hippolyta from the audience. Titania's bower was a bed of granary sacks.

The rest of the simple staging involved just two step ladders and four banks of four small lamps. The school parties from nearby Colchester went politely wild until three girls in smart green uniforms rushed the stage at the end and asked if they could join in the encore of the ecstatic final fairy dance. They could and they did.

"I'm passionate about this," says Hall. "The whole point of appealing to young people with Shakespeare is to cut out the frills. Since we have done full-length versions of plays like The Dream, The Shrew and now The Merchant, it make sense for us to do compressed versions for these school parties because we know how to preserve the integrity of the play, and we know where the best bits are. And as we get more sophisticated about it, I think that the show will become part performance and part lecture, with the actors talking back to the kids.

"The really big thing about Shakespeare Live is that it brings the kids out of school and into an exciting arena, not necessarily a traditional theatre, and it's an outing on a bus, and you start this idea of theatre-going. Not one single Shakespeare play is immune, as far as I can see, to this process of demystification. All of them are open to a kind of fairy tale approach; they're all about metaphor, and all fluid and written in verse. Theatre is a place for metaphor in the way that film isn't so easily."

The new Propeller Merchant will be touring, nationally and internationally, in the New Year together with a revival of the company's A Midsummer Night's Dream. There's just one sound effect in The Merchant, a ringing bell. "I wanted to mix all of that with a contemporary sensibility. I'm really not interested in trying to understand what this or that would have meant to the 16th century sensibility. I want to take away the lenses and get to the heart of the play. And then find how it reflects our experiences."

So far, the Shakespeare Live project has taken schoolchildren into the surprise theatrical environments of an Essex barn, a Cheltenham pump room, a custard factory in Birmingham, a university campus in Liverpool, a converted carpet warehouse in Halifax and a reconfigured thrust stage in Newcastle. Let's hope The Dream in Great Peter Street, Westminster, is not too stuffy an occasion for Mr Balls and his batmen.

'The Merchant of Venice' is at the Lighthouse, Poole, 3-6 December and tours throughout 2009 with 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', opening at the Liverpool Everyman on 22 January (www.propeller.org.uk)

A theatrical dynasty

Edward Hall

Edward, son of Peter and half-brother to Rebecca, runs the all-male Shakespeare Company Propeller. He began his career as a theatre director at the Watermill Theatre in the early 1990s where he directed several Shakespeare plays and is best known for directing Rose Rage at the Haymarket in 2002, a plucky stage adaptation of the Bard's three Henry VI plays. Edward, 41, is married to the comedian Issy van Randwyck with whom he has a daughter.

Peter Hall

In the year he graduated from Cambridge, Peter Hall staged his first professional play. From there followed an illustrious career in theatre direction which began at the Oxford Playhouse and led to running the London Arts Theatre where he directed the English language premiere of Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Directing at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon preceded his greatest role as founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company aged 29. He went on to lead the National Theatre (1973-1988) and was a member of the Arts Council but resigned in protest at funding cuts. He then founded his own company directing at the Old Vic. Knighted in 1977 for his services to theatre, Sir Peter Hall won an Olivier Award in 1999, and even today at the age of 78 he sold out a run of As You Like It as director of the new Rose Theatre at Kingston-Upon-Thames.

Rebecca Hall

Rebecca followed her father Peter Hall to read English literature at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and while studying she performed and set up a theatre company. After dropping out of university she won the Charleson Award for her 2002 professional stage debut in her father's production of Mrs Warren's Profession at the Strand Theatre. Her first film role was not until 2006 with Starter for 10 as the misfit who wins the heart of James McAvoy. A role in The Prestige followed and she is due to appear in a number of high profile films from Frost/Nixon to Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

Elisa Bray