MODERN DRESS productions of Shakespeare’s plays sacrifice much of his intended impact and risk triteness, the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company said at the weekend.

Speaking at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, Michael Boyd said: “You can’t divorce the plays from their historical context or the present. But for me you get less juice out of the plays if you set them in the present. You lose shed loads.”

Setting a play in a specific contemporary scenario can encourage the audience to draw overly simplistic, distracting links between it and Shakespeare’s words, he said.

However there are also, he acknowledged, clear benefits to adapting Shakespeare’s work to the present “if you are really alert to the major pitfalls.”

“You can gain an enormous amount. The gain is immediacy and availability.

“It’s a viable way to go and it has integrity. The problem is that you are stuck with the contemporary references.”

The National Theatre staged one of the most provocative modern dress history plays of recent times in 2003, transposing Henry V to Iraq and strewing the stage with the jeeps, machine guns and television cameras. The critics unanimously saluted Adrian Lester’s performance as the king but were split over the success of the adaptation.

Mr Boyd belongs in the camp which thinks that giving Shakespeare such a specific fresh context is fraught with difficulties. “I don’t think we have gone into Iraq “to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels” which is the motivation passed on to Hal (the future Henry V by his father Henry IV).”

Directors of Shakespeare have to navigate between three periods- when the play is set, when it was written and when it is performed. Rupert Goold’s acclaimed Macbeth, which stars Patrick Stewart as the ruthless Scottish king and opened in the West End last month, is a good example. It is styled after Stalin’s Russia, with video projections of troops marching through Red Square and the murder of Banquo carried out on board a packed train carriage but at the same time an essay in the programme emphasises the play’s multiple references to the politics of the time, including the recently discovered Gunpowder Plot.

“Shakespeare himself had a very bifocal view,” Mr Boyd said. “When he is writing about Athens it’s not really about Athens. When he is writing about Egypt it’s not about Egypt and when he’s writing about the 1400s it’s really about the 1590s or the 1600s.”

Mr Boyd is credited with revitalising the RSC since he took up his post in 2003.

His crowning achievement has been the Complete Works Festival which saw all of Shakespeare’s plays performed in Stratford-upon-Avon in a single year, including an Indian production of A Midsummer Night's Dream spoken in eight languages, an Arab Richard III and a puppet show Hamlet.

The eight Wars of the Roses history plays are Mr Boyd’s current project. He has staged warmly reviewed productions of both cycles of four plays in Stratford and next year will present them together in order of composition and then in order of chronological setting.

One of the productions- Richard III- is in modern dress “even though it follows directly on from a medieval Henry VI part III”, alerting Mr Boyd to the hazards of drawing too many contemporary parallels.

“I always start from the premise that there’s got be a very good reason to try and be very specific culturally outside of Shakespeare’s time.

“My approach is to try and imagine that Shakespeare is in the room, to try and get inside his head. Therefore historians and the research they do into the period are very useful to me, helping me to put myself into the religious and political landscape that he might have been in.

“On the other hand if I pretend that I can make myself, or my cast or my audience come with nothing (of the contemporary world) in their heads I would obviously be being foolish. If they (the plays) are to be put on the stage now they have to come from where they came from- Shakespeare’s brain- and speak as clearly as they possibly can now.”

Explore Stage

• Theatre

• Comedy

• Opera

• Dance

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette