Daniela Gatta, 15, will not forget the day she saw a production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest on a school trip. “Today I saw the beauty of Shakespeare. I never realised the beauty in the words. I just didn’t get it. Now I realise that every line is beautiful. I will look at Shakespeare differently now,” she said after watching a production of the play by the Tara Arts theatre company in London’s West End.

She is one of 10,000 school students to benefit every year from Mousetrap Theatre Projects, a charity dedicated to helping school students to develop an understanding and love of the theatre. Mousetrap Theatre Projects covers a wide range of theatrical work.

For many of the young people who go on trips organised by the charity, it is their first visit to the theatre. “At the heart of our work is the desire to open doors to young people who might otherwise consider the theatre closed to them,” says Susan Whiddington, the charity’s director.

Mousetrap works on the principle that, while teachers widely acknowledge the importance of allowing Shakespearean texts to come to life in dramatic form, they often lack the confidence and knowhow to do this in the classroom. It also notes that, while actors, writers and directors are often keen to spread their love of theatre to children, they may lack the opportunity to do so.

The charity acts as a matchmaker between the two and runs a wide range of educational programmes bringing them together on the stage and in the classroom. As part of the London Theatre Challenge, it brings 5,000 students a year from disadvantaged London state secondary schools to see outstanding theatre productions at £3 a ticket, offering an after-show discussion and a teacher’s resource pack.

It runs a similar programme for special schools as well as a schemes for partially sighted pupils and for students from Pupil Referral Units, who have been excluded from mainstream schools, often because of behavioural difficulties.

Its Play the Critic scheme for A-level students teaches teenagers how to review a production, using professional theatre critics, directors and writers. There are also technical courses for students wanting to learn about sound and lighting design and a business programme for those wanting to know about marketing, administration and budgeting.

On the day that Daniela and her Year-11 friends from Sion Manning Roman Catholic Girls’ School in London attended a production of The Tempest at the Arts Theatre in London the emphasis is on direction.

Jatinder Verma, the founder of Tara Arts and the director of the production, puts the students through their paces in a workshop before the performance and stays behind afterwards to answer their questions. He starts them with a simple exercise walking around the stage reading lines from one of Caliban’s speeches. At the end of each line the students must stop and start walking in a different direction.

Next, they are asked to change direction at every comma and every full stop. Then, they can choose at which points of the text to stop. Finally the director asks them to shout out the words and then to repeat the speech in a whisper. “You cannot understand Shakespeare’s poetry sitting down. You have to walk it, you have to speak it out loud,” he says.

As they stop and start and repeat the verse, the students gain a sense of the speech’s structure and, eventually its meaning. For most it is a revelation.

Chloe Bennai, 16, who was unfamiliar with The Tempest before the trip, was impressed. “Speaking the text so many times in so many different ways was very effective. It made us get more involved with the words and in the end we were able to interpret it in our own way,” she says. Jacqui Worell, 16, adds: “Now I know how much hard work actors have to go through.”

The girls are also impressed at how much has been achieved during the production with a minimal set, consisting of heavy ropes hanging from the ceiling, which are used by the cast to conjure up both the raging ocean and different locations on dry land.

Natali Dragic, 16, says: “It made me realise how simplicity can go a long way. You don’t really need a lot of things to make a performance, you just need imagination.”

Mousetrap Theatre Projects was founded in 1997 by Sir Stephen Waley-Cohen, producer of Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap, using money from that long-running production. The charity’s trustees include Mathew Prichard, Christie’s grandson.

As well as its work with schools, the charity runs a project called Family First Nights, which provides West End theatre tickets at £5 a head for deprived families. The aim, says Whiddington, is to break down among this group the idea that theatre is “not for people like us”.

“We bring in families who have never before been to the theatre and who never thought they would go. Then we find ways to make sure they can keep coming back,” she said.