You wouldn’t expect the first black actor to play an English king for the Royal Shakespeare Company to confess that the Bard’s immortal words initially came across as gobbledygook.

But that’s exactly what David Oyelowo is admitting. What’s more, he reckons most British schoolchildren feel the same way.

“My first experience of Shakespeare was probably not dissimilar to most people’s”, says Oyelowo, fresh from his controversial role as the teacher in the television drama Shoot the Messenger. He was taught Romeo and Juliet for GCSE at a north London boys’ school. “We were taught the play in a very dry way — as literature, not drama. It felt like a foreign language class to me.”

Just like thousands of children before and since, forced to study classics such as Macbeth or Hamlet, Oyelowo, 30, was turned off by the boring lessons. For a while he was embarrassed that he didn’t have the foggiest what some of the prose of the world’s most famous playwright actually meant.

“They were English lessons and I could string the words together but I couldn’t eke out the meaning. I didn’t ‘get’ Shakespeare at all.”

Now the actor, whose family comes from Nigeria and who made theatre history when he played Henry VI in 2000, is spearheading a campaign to revolutionise the teaching of Shakespeare in schools.

This week the RSC will call for a radical overhaul of the teaching of England’s greatest plays. Unless change happens, it warns, another generation of children will leave school with a horror of being force-fed the Bard. Last year Edexcel the exam board revealed that many sixthformers could not even spell the playwright’s name.

The company wants teachers to “put the plays on their feet”, enabling children to grasp them through acting. And it’s demanding that all children see one live Shakespearean performance.

“Stop your average young person, ask them what they think about Shakespeare and ‘Boring!’ will be a common response,” says Maria Evans, the RSC’s director of learning. “Shakespeare remains the only writer studied by every young person in Britain — but many leave formal education determined never to come into contact with the Bard again.”

Ministers have never dared remove Shakespeare’s plays from the curriculum, fearing an outcry from those who think the classics should be a staple of the classroom. Younger teenagers have a choice of three plays: Richard III, The Tempest and Much Ado About Nothing; GCSE students choose one more.

The RSC argues that instead of asking GCSE candidates to answer written questions they should be allowed to act out their understanding of a play. “What are you testing: their writing skills, or their understanding of Shakespeare?” asks Evans.

For Oyelowo the epiphany came when he was taken to a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “It was a formative moment. It didn’t feel like Shakespeare. It was just a great night in the theatre,” he recalls.

“These plays are written to be performed. It’s like music, you don’t read music, you play it. It’s the same with Shakespeare, it has to be spoken out loud. That’s what cracks it open. I am a professional actor now but it still takes me five read throughs a Shakespeare play to get what is going on.”

Oyelowo, who plays agent Danny Hunter in the television spy drama Spooks, is convinced that even teachers don’t “get” Shakespeare, which is why they find it difficult to enthuse their pupils.

“My experience was 15 years ago. But I recently gave a talk to English teachers and I could see there was a kind of trepidation linked to the teaching of Shakespeare. It will be difficult and arduous to teach, is how some seem to feel. It’s going to be tough so let’s bite our lip and get on with it.”

The problem stretches all the way into universities, agrees Jonathan Bate, professor of Shakespeare at Warwick University. He believes universities will soon have to put on remedial courses for students who don’t have a clue what the plays are about.

“I think school children should be exposed to Shakespeare but there’s no point doing that if you’re going to turn them off,” says Bate. “The government’s making 14-year-olds study Shakespeare for all the wrong reasons.”

Oyelowo remembers that when he first started at the RSC he attended a meeting with the likes of Adrian Noble and voice coach Cicely Berry. The discussion turned to Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter. “I realised that through all my time at school I never understood what iambic pentameter was. It was like an out-of-body experience; I recall the fear. In front of this illustrious company I asked ‘Miss Berry, what is iambic pentameter?’ And do you know, actors who were 50 craned forward to hear her reply.”

Yesterday Oyelowo was due to take his four-year-old son to see Romeo and Juliet at the youth theatre in Brighton. Did he think Asher would enjoy it? “I don’t know. But he’s loved coming with me to the rehearsals,” says his father. For one boy, at least, Shakespeare could turn out to be fun.