WHETHER it's performing Hamlet among the stalagmites of Poole's Cavern or giving Ophelia emergency first aid at Quad, Derby's 1623 Theatre Company have a unique take on Shakespeare.

"Unconventional spaces" is artistic director Ben Spiller's mantra so the Bard's best has been performed in the Glastonbury mud, in front of Joseph Wright's paintings in Derby Museum and on hospital wards.

The company started in 2005, with Ben, from Littleover, and 20 associate artists, plus a video artist and a resident musician/composer.

"They way we were formed sounds quite romantic, really," says Ben. "It was around an ancient oak tree in the Oxfordshire countryside where we put on a production called The Course of True Love, a collection of love scenes from Shakespeare's plays. But we weren't even called 1623 then.

"What we discovered was that this collection of scenes from the plays was more accessible and digestible for people who might not sit through a whole play."

Back in Derby, two more shows were developed – Sinful Shakespeare and Stand-up Shakespeare (with all the plays' fools recast as modern-style comedians).

Sinful Shakespeare, looking at the portrayal of the seven deadly sins in Shakespeare, was performed promenade-style at the Silk Mill Museum.

Ben studied theatre at Warwick University and took an MA in European Renaissance Culture before teaching Shakespeare in Oxford.

"He's the best playwright we have ever had," he says. "The mission of 1623 is to engage existing and new audiences with Shakespeare's inspirational language, his vibrant characters and exciting sense of the theatre."

But Ben has also wanted to achieve all that in an unconventional way and not necessarily in a theatre building.

"Even if we do perform in an actual theatre, we do it differently," says Ben. "We performed at Milton Keynes Theatre last year and we took the audience on a tour of the building."

Productions of Hamlet and Macbeth in Poole's Cavern, near Buxton, are among the adventurous ideas promoted by Ben.

"We couldn't let the audience or actors stay in the cave for longer than two hours because of the cold," he says. "We didn't want hypothermia to set in."

But that isn't Ben's oddest experience to date.

"That was probably Glastonbury Festival, in wellies in the middle of a muddy field performing Shakespearean love scenes set in the 1960s with all the characters reimagined as hippies or rockers," he says.

Last year 1623 linked up with the St John Ambulance for Emergency Shakespeare. With the Bard's characters (such as Othello having an epileptic seizure) receiving first aid for their ills in and around Quad.

Next up for 1623 is a three-year project linked to the Cultural Olympiad which is helping bring an artistic element to the London 2012 games.

Ben's brainchild is the Great Shakespearean Workout with the audience performing aerobics while reciting lines from Troilus and Cressida.

"We chose Troilus and Cressida because of its links to the Ancient Greeks where the Olympics were born. It fits beautifully. For example one of the Trojan warrior's mantra in the play is 'good arms, strong joints, true swords and full of heart'. It's arts and sport working together."

The project gets its premiere at Cathedral Green in Derby on April 23 (Shakespeare's birthday) and then will be seen at nine Derbyshire festivals and at schools.

It will build over the next two years, going to Japan in 2011 and turning into a full performance of the play itself in 2012 which will again be premiered in Derby before going to Stratford for one of the nine main events of the Cultural Olympiad.

"It's all there in the plays," says Ben. "Some people say, 'do you only do Shakespeare?'. But there are 36, possibly 37 plays there, each one very rich in characters, themes, ideas, issues and language. Every theme you can think of is in at least one of the plays."

More details at www.1623theatre.co.uk.