HOW OFTEN do adults try to interest teenagers in Shakespeare? The story of bardic salvation has become almost a dramatic device in itsel, so often is it used.

Recent publicity for the British Museum exhibit Staging the World, for example, has been telling us what a comfort Shakespeare was to Nelson Mandela during the decades of white imprisonment.

Now directors, Rob Curry and Anthony Fletcher, of Fifth Column Films, have had a go, persuading 17 London teenagers to perform The Tempest on The Oval, magically transformed into a mysterious island.

It’s Shakespeare’s last play but this film is called just Tempest, which happens to be also the name of Bob Dylan’s just-released album.

It took the singer-songwriter 71 years to make his Tempest and the two directors five years to make their movie on a five-figure (sic) budget. Fifth Column says the 79-minute docudrama “offers a perspective from the inside-out, giving a voice to young people who don’t want to be boxed into conventional social categories.

“In a year of national festivity and following on from the London riots of July 2011, the film offers a poetic account of what it means to grow up on an inner-city estate and what it means to be British.” (British? Not English?)

Curry, who lives in Hackney, told Loving Dalston: “We chose to use Shakespeare because kids at school are all still required to study Shakespeare — and mostly hate it. 

“We wanted to provide them with a challenge — staging a play written in pretty much another language — and to explore the relevance to their lives. More specifically, we chose The Tempest because we were making a film about modern multicultural society, and it is the first response in literature to the discovery of the new world and the birth of colonialism.”

Curry and Fletcher founded the Bow-based Fifth Column Films in 2006 after working in theatre.

* Little-known fact: Caliban, the name of a leading character in The Tempest, is Romany for blackness.