By Hannah Goff BBC News education reporter

No it's not another troubled night in sectarian Glasgow - it's Romeo and Juliet, Act III Scene I.

St Thomas Aquinas Secondary School are using the sectarian undercurrent that runs through the city in their performance of the play.

Modern day adaptations have been popular in the 20th Century

The Glasgow school is one of many performing interestingly bespoke versions of the Bard's work as part of this year's Shakespeare Schools Festival.

Pupils dressed as Celtic and Rangers fans represent the Montagues and the Capulets.

Stepney Green Boys School, in east London, have likewise taken something that's familiar to them, the 2012 Olympics, to aid their interpretation of Macbeth.

In their version, the murderous noble's ambitions for kingship are replaced by a top athlete's desire for Olympic glory.

Macbeth becomes MacFly and Lady Macbeth his personal trainer (and a man).

The coveted prize worth killing for is not Duncan's crown, but the captaincy of the England athletics team.

Oh gentle geazer, Oh Blood. 'Tis not for you to hear what I speak. Dunfor has OD'd Stepney Green Boys School's version of Macbeth

Teacher Will Smith explains his pupils are all touched by the developments for the Olympics which are under way on the school's doorstep.

"The reason we do it like this is because it makes it more relevant. It makes it more understandable and they find it far more exciting," he says.

"We've had to compromise some things because you can't call Olympic officials lords, for example, but it's still in meter.

"It's a half way house really. You have got to meet them in the middle or else it's as dry as a bone."

In this version, King Duncan appears in the guise of chief coach Dunfor, whom MacFly murders by lacing his drink with pills.

When MacDuff discovers his murdered body, he cries: "Oh gentle geezer, Oh Blood. 'Tis not for you to hear what I speak. Dunfor has OD'd."

'Street language'

But hasn't this modern adaptation become something so distant from the original that it is unrecognisable?

Mr Smith argues: "If Shakespeare was writing today then he wouldn't use the same old jokes or even the same language. He would use the language of the streets.

"So we use some modern street language too."

Director of the Shakespeare Institute at Birmingham University, Professor Kate McLuskie, says such adaptations have been fashionable throughout the 20th Century beginning with Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story.

"Shakespeare was felt to be an essential part of humanist education. But people struggled with it because it is difficult to read.

"There is also the fact that Shakespeare is thought to speak universally across time."

'Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells'

This makes his plays great candidates for creative adaptations, she argues.

But why can't students simply learn and perform Shakespeare in the way it was written?

Prof McLuskie says: "What we are trying to say here is it's wonderful and we want the kids to have access to it.

"There are people who think that education shouldn't be fun - the 'disgusted of Tunbridge Wells' characters.

"They don't think children should enjoy learning. But I don't think you will find many academics who would have a problem with such adaptations," she says.

Subjecting a play to the creative process of adaptation "usually produces such energy and thoughtfulness in the kids - that it can be fantastic," she adds.

Swanlea School in Whitechapel, east London, set their version of Romeo and Juliet in war-torn Sarajevo.

After "mining" the play, as head of performing arts Daniel Shindler describes it, they decided to use their performance to explore the true story of the romance between a Muslim girl and a Serbian Christian boy who died in each other's arms.

Suicide bomber

"Romeo and Juliet is essentially about conflict between two families and two cultural groups," he says.

"This has a lot of resonance in a multi-cultural setting because there are issues about mixed relationships that need exploring."

By subjecting the play to close analysis, they found more and more parallels with the Sarajevo love story and their own personal experience, he said.

For example the students reinterpreted the scene in which Mercutio dies as a suicide bomb attack on a queue of shoppers outside a bakery.

Some 1,050 schools are involved in the festival

Mr Shindler says this was not designed to shock - it was just what came out when the pupils, 80% of whom are Bengali and come from near Brick Lane, "mined" the text.

"It would have been a lot easier if we had just given out a bunch of scripts. But if I had given them a load of Shakespeare it wouldn't have meant much to them," he says.

"They must have an encounter with the text and that encounter is a three-way relationship.

"Shakespeare is amazingly rich because of the language and what we have found in the language is extraordinarily rich.

"The pupils have found in the Shakespeare, relevant and up to date issues from their own personal experience."

"It doesn't matter now if it doesn't go well on the night because it is the process of learning that is important."

Performances from the Shakespeare Schools Festival take place at the Shaw Theatre in Euston on Monday 5 February