Ben Power is telling me how septuagenarians love. “It is possible to imagine,” says the playwright and dramaturg — who, aged only 28, is straining here for a maturity far beyond his years — “that trying to get your wife of 50 years to go to bed with you necessitates a teenage level of interaction.”

It is indeed possible to imagine — and Power has done so, by creating A Tender Thing, a Shakespeare revamp that dices and splices the text of Romeo and Juliet to recast its lovers as silver-haired sweethearts. To you and me Shakespeare’s tragedy may be the greatest articulation of the heady rush, the obsession and the angst of adolescent love. But to Power its poetry is just as applicable to the elderly.

A Tender Thing is the first of two “radical reworkings of classic material” that the Royal Shakespeare Company has commissioned Power to deliver. The company chose its adapter well. As sidekick to the hot-shot director Rupert Goold (Power is literary associate at Goold’s company Headlong), he brazenly reimagined Paradise Lost and Dr Faustus. A Tender Thing likewise plays merry hell with the original R&J.

“I make no bones about it,” Power says. “I take the bits that are useful and ignore the bits that aren’t.” Out goes every character save the lovers; the play is a two-hander. In comes a song from Twelfth Night and some stuff from the sonnets. The result, Power says, “is not just in dialogue with the one play, but with all of Shakespeare’s writing about love”. But mainly “it’s an experiment,” he continues, “to see how flexible the language [of Romeo and Juliet] is, and how universal its poetic heart is if you recontextualise it.”

When we meet, he is anxious that this “experiment” be seen as “more than just an intellectual exercise”. He has experience on that score: his recent version of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author was criticised by some for its grandstanding conceptual pyrotechnics; and Complicite’s maths drama A Disappearing Number (on which he worked as dramaturg) was boffinish in the extreme. A Tender Thing will certainly appeal to those interested in clever games being played with Shakespeare: the “nightingale and lark” scene is reimagined, for example, as the lovers’ last exchange before the terminally ill Juliet undergoes euthanasia. But the play has heart, too.

“You don’t stop wrestling with emotional complexities as you get older,” Power says. Love makes teenagers of us all; and yet Romeo and Juliet’s sweet nothings and bold commitments will surely be enriched when spoken by those with the (bitter) experience to know what they signify. And as for “the issues of mortality and loss in the original, they’re more interesting and apt with older characters,” Power says. “The death of teenage lovers may be tragic, but that confrontation with death as you get older becomes much keener.”

The production was inspired by the RSC artistic director Michael Boyd’s observation that actors didn’t stop wanting to play Romeo and Juliet as they got older. Not too much older, though – the lovers are to be played by Kathryn Hunter, aged 53, and Forbes Masson, a spring chicken at 46. Both are terrific performers who should ensure that Power’s play transcends its “intellectual exercise” dimension.

Not that Power is apologetic about being intellectual. He is on a one-man mission to popularise a concept — dramaturgy — long considered un-British and dangerously egg-headed. He isn’t, he insists, a playwright. He sees himself in “the tradition of the Kenneth Tynan literary manager. Tynan moved from active participation in rehearsals, through casting, design. He commissioned plays, and gave notes at preview performances. That fluid movement between the creative and the producing teams is what I’m interested in,” Power says.

And he has been since university, where he dreamt of combining his practical and academic interests in theatre. Whether he’s billed as writer, dramaturg or as adapter of Cinderella last Christmas at the Lyric Hammersmith, “it’s the same. Every production needs somebody involved who is responsible for the positioning of text in the process”.

British theatre has resisted that, Power says, because the dominant postwar directors — Peter Hall, Trevor Nunn — “came from academic Oxbridge backgrounds, and were themselves quite forthright with their views on text. So it wasn’t necessary to have someone supporting them”. But theatre is diversifying: to more and more directors (Goold, Boyd and Complicite’s Simon McBurney among them), text is just one among several theatrical tools at their disposal. And “if you’ve got a choreographer, a lighting designer and someone in charge of puppetry,” Power says, “it’s mad that you wouldn’t want somebody in the room whose responsibility is ensuring the right words are being spoken in the right way. That should apply to an RSC Hamlet as much as it does to Simon McBurney’s ‘physical’ theatre.”

Power’s achievements are a persuasive argument for that idea. He even had a hand in the hottest theatre property in 2009, having shepherded Lucy Prebble’s Enron through two years’ development at Headlong. He admits that its success (West End and Broadway transfers; a movie deal) threatens to turn the company into an Enron-style global power in theatre.

Power is completing Marlowe’s partially lost Massacre at Paris for the RSC and adapting Gulliver’s Travels with Goold. The novel, he says, is perfect for Headlong because it “combines intellectual curiosity with the potential for grand theatrical gesture”. Ideally, for the man who turned his academic passion into a flourishing theatre career, “the great thing about Gulliver’s Travels,” he says, “is that it’s incredibly smart.”

A Tender Thing, Northern Stage, Newcastle upon Tyne (0191-230 5151), until November 7, 2009

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