Educational theatre has a bad name, but Thomas de Mallet Burgess hopes to change that, he tells Christine Madden.

When Thomas de Mallet Burgess left university, Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, and "all my friends", he recounts, "were going into merchant banks", where they planned to earn fabulous amounts of money. He didn't, opting instead to go into performing arts (in which you can safely assume you will not be earning fabulous amounts of money).

"I made a choice to continue to develop. I have to challenge myself, and so sometimes I have to make extreme decisions." His most recent extreme decision brought him back into the world of education, as the new director of Team Educational Theatre Company, where he will assuredly challenge not only himself but also hundreds of schoolchildren into the bargain.

What makes the decision extreme is the genre hop: after 14 years of opera direction, de Mallet Burgess has made a move back into theatre. "One reason I find myself coming back to theatre is to be able to work with actors, but with the same expansive elements as with opera. Theatre allows for more freedom and authorship of a production."

His fellow students had been leaping into merchant banking from Oxford, where de Mallet Burgess had read philosophy and modern languages at St Edmund Hall. His opera credits span continents and include productions of Alessandro Stradella and La Vestale for Wexford Festival Opera, Il barbiere di Siviglia at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, La Traviata at the Belfast Opera House and La bohème, Don Giovanni and L'elisir d'amore with English Touring Opera. Just before he came to Team he spent three years as associate artistic director at the Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music.

Having turned away from opera for the time being, de Mallet Burgess is enjoying the artistic freedom he sought in Team's latest production for post-primary audience. Devotion was written by Leo Butler and first produced by Theatre Centre in London. "It was originally commissioned as a physical theatre piece, so it spent a lot of time trying to fulfil that brief, but I thought it was so much more than that."

De Mallet Burgess finds echoes of Beckett and Ionesco in Devotion. "It reminds me in many ways of Waiting for Godot." Similar to an adult piece of theatre presented in Dublin earlier this year - Family Stories, by Biljana Srbljanovic - the young characters struggle to give their lives meaning against a background of war, homelessness and loss by working through conflicts among themselves. The twist, says de Mallet Burgess, is that "at the end, you're not sure whether all this really is a war or conflict. It could be three kids thrown out of their home for a day, marking time until they can go back."

The piece dredges up the pervasive awareness of war and conflict through the media. "The façade of war represented by bombs, missiles and fanatical devotion to the cause of 'daddy' starts to break down," explains de Mallet Burgess. "It's up to the audience to decide whether it's real or imaginary. They have to get used to the disorientation and displacement that are part of any dispute."

De Mallet Burgess's production therefore perfectly serves Team's double brief: to produce quality theatre for young people, as well as theatre that resonates with their lives, that's "educational". Applied to theatre, that adjective usually has about as much appeal as a platterful of overcooked Brussels sprouts; but, argues de Mallet Burgess, it needn't be that way. "Educational theatre has got a bad name for itself," he concedes. "But Team has a wonderful reputation. Educational theatre has sometimes been about a narrow mission, such as road safety and drugs, but Team produces theatre that can touch upon these issues, yet explores them in a more complex way than the merely didactic."

The term "educational", according to de Mallet Burgess, covers a spectrum of meaning. "There's the didactic 'monologic' at one end, in which the receiver is given little choice in what message to take away." A non-theatrical example would be the television ads against drinking and driving. "Then there's the consciousness-raising end - most theatre falls into that bracket. Team comes somewhere in the middle of that."

The knife edge that Team has successfully managed to manoeuvre for 30 years makes it possible to put together creative, entertaining and awareness-raising theatre that allows room for personal interpretation of the relativities of life - for which young people, trained from infancy to see things as good or evil, black or white, do not yet have the skills to assess and cope with.

Devotion provides a pertinent opportunity and example with which to explore not only its own issues, but also how children deal with the constant barrage of conflicting adult information. "Who knows what young people are thinking when bombarded with pictures of 9/11, Israel and London? Who's bothering to find out?" In workshops, which accompany the play as it travels across Ireland, Team explores issues with the students that examine the play, its characters and conflict: "At what point does a freedom fighter become a terrorist? And are there justifications for war?"

Through the workshops, the company go beyond platitudes such as "war is bad, peace is good" (or the other way around, according to some more aggressive world leaders). "We try to unlock the complexity and lep young people make choices, to value the expression of ideas, and the confusion this sometimes causes. To embrace the confusion. That's the paradox at the heart of it."

Team tours and presents its issues to an audience "that's pretty much neglected", says de Mallet Burgess. "Why? Because they don't vote. But it won't be our generation that will sort out this mess; we're too busy dealing with it. It will be they that have to deal with it."

After the tour of Devotion, de Mallet Burgess has a few irons in the fire for next year. He plans to present a piece for first and second class pupils on dealing and coping with loss and death: How High is Up?, by Brendan Murray. He has also commissioned Francis Kay to write a play looking at suicide for the post-primary level. "It looks beyond morality to ideals we are prepared to live or die for, and whatever crossover is between the two.

He hopes to collaborate with Peter Greenaway on The Falls Project, a theatre adaptation of Greenaway's 1978 film. The project would also derive from a cataclysmic world in which a "violent unknown event" has changed life forever for its victims. In future, he would like to explore risky topics, such as gender identity.

"I can approach potentially sensitive issues only because Team is trusted and has a good track record," he says. "It takes a huge amount of trust on the part of schools, funding bodies and the Government for us to be in a position to look at these issues."

For the most part, Team tours to schools, bringing its productions and workshops to venues not open to the public. But the company will also present Devotion during the FizzFest at the Helix theatre on October 10th-12th. Its school tour continues until December 15th, for which he says, "we're over- subscribed".

Luckily for de Mallet Burgess, Team's ethos - to explore sensitive territory creatively and present opportunities for personal growth - beautifully coincides with his own aims in life. "I struggle a lot with what makes life meaningful. It seems to me that that is the subject of theatre. As an artist, as a director, I have to grow."