I have a confession to make. Earlier this year, in a theatre, halfway through a show, I slipped my 11-year-old son an iPhone and suggested that he play some games on it. I'm not proud of this act of treason. It was prompted by the look on the boy's face as he glared at the stage, and by a rising panic in my chest that he was about to be put off theatre for ever. Look away, I wanted to say. It's not all like this, I promise.

This was a play whose publicity promised irreverence and fun. A play that was an hour and 15 minutes. A play in modern English. In other words – not even Shakespeare.

Theatre for young audiences groans under the weight of its responsibility to keep the future engaged in an art form that sometimes feels like it's hanging by a thread. Shakespeare for young audiences doubles that pressure, requesting an engagement not only with the future, but also with the past. So why bother? The risk and responsibility is too great. Why not hang on, and introduce his plays as archaeological literary digs at A-level – like Chaucer or Milton? What would young people really lose? Harry Potter speaks more directly to them than Prospero. Jacqueline Wilson's heroines are more immediately identifiable than Rosalind or Viola.

The introduction of Shakespeare to young people is often advocated out of a sense of reactionary paranoia about a slipping of standards or an eroding of national identity: Shakespeare as warm beer or red phone boxes. These protective responses rarely extend in any detail to the task of how we keep Shakespeare alive for audiences. They talk of form, but not of the life inside that form. They talk of a masochistic drive to do things "properly", to keep the language un-doctored, the codes encrypted.

Shakespeare deserves more respect than this. His influence is contemporary in many aspects of our western world – a world also inhabited by young people. If we ignore Shakespeare in performance, then we lose connections to full-bodied human archetypes, narratives and questions that are rooted in where we come from and which are urgent to how we live today. His plays are a humanist scripture. (Harold Bloom lists Jesus Christ, Jahweh and Hamlet as the three most important literary figures of our time.) Keeping young people away from Shakespeare is like removing a link to their humanness.

How, then, do we prevent the iPhone moment? This is a question being asked by artists and educationalists throughout the UK and elsewhere. The RSC has developed a manifesto for Shakespeare in schools entitled Stand Up for Shakespeare. The three tenets of its campaign are: "Do it on your feet", "See it live" and "Start it earlier". The company lobbies vigorously for younger engagement in Shakespeare; they have an education department that works with school groups as young as year one. They teach the text through kinaesthetic learning – through doing and feeling. They defuse a fear of the language by connecting it to a directness of thought and action. They also have a strand of productions called Young People's Shakespeare (YPS) that goes into primary and secondary schools. This year, I am editing and directing their YPS production of The Taming of the Shrew. There was concern at the beginning of the project that Shrew was not a suitable play for eight-year-olds. In the education work that is being done in the development of this production, we have discovered that there are few stories not suitable if they are handled with honesty, sensitivity and presence.

I have a strand of my own work that addresses Shakespeare for young audiences: four plays published this year under the collective name of I, Shakespeare. The first, I, Caliban, was written for a commission from Brighton festival in 2003 and premiered in local primary schools. At the start there was never any intention to make a series, although a fifth play is now being planned – each a telling of Shakespeare's better known plays by one of their lesser known characters: Caliban, Peaseblossom, Banquo and Malvolio. My commission has always been to tell the story of that host play, but also to make a piece of performance that has integrity in and of itself. This is a difficult balance to achieve. A child knows when they are on the receiving end of a didactic exercise, or when they are sitting in the shadow of something else.

With I, Malvolio it felt particularly important to generate an experience that stood alone. Twelfth Night is a complex weave of plots and subplots that would take all my time to unpick. Instead, I have followed the themes of an archetypal character who exists for young and old alike – the self-deluded authoritarian prude, the victim of his own unbending and the cruelty of his audience, the theatre-hating zealot bullied not least by dint of his being stuck on a stage. The actual story of Twelfth Night is presented as an example of the excesses of woolly-headed liberalism. By following the lead that Shakespeare gave me, but by bringing my own interests to bear, I hope the work becomes an honest response rather than a pale reduction.

I, Malvolio opened to school groups aged 11 and over. It has also, unaltered, found a following among late-night adult theatre audiences. Just as The Taming of the Shrew can be unlocked for eight-year-olds, so good children's theatre can speak to any age. A child is dignified if they are treated as being part of the world in all its complexity, not protected from it. Shakespeare is a rewarding and vital complexity.

Each of my Shakespeare pieces is different to the other, but each espouses a set of philosophies common to all my theatre work. I would like to think that these philosophies apply as much to the young people's work as to the adult work. I would also hope that they are not far away from what Shakespeare would have espoused. Tell a story to the room. Trust language. Respect the audience's ability to effect transformation. Make thinking enjoyable. Don't be afraid of difficulty. Play seriously and, seriously, play.

• I, Shakespeare is published by Oberon Books. More information at timcrouchtheatre.co.uk