I am sitting in a cramped backstage space in Brisbane’s intimate Cremorne Theatre during a preview of Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome: A Shakespeare Commentary, by Heiner Müller. I’m having trouble writing because my right hand is swathed in bandages, having been ‘cut off’ by Aaron the Moor.

On stage a battle rages as members of the all-male cast fling blood-soaked copies of Penguin Shakespeare at each other to the strains of a corny MGM fanfare from Demetrius and the Gladiators. Shortly I shall enter as mad Titus, wearing a chef’s hat and apron, banging a dinner gong and ladling helpings of blood from a big bucket into the cupped hands of my dinner guests in an obscene parody of Holy Communion. ‘Where are my sons?’ asks the empress Tamora, to which I reply, ‘You’ve just eaten them, you nigger’s whore . . . How tastes your scum?’

This is what you might call theatre in the raw. I’m curious to see how many people will walk out.

Titus is a co-production between Bell Shakespeare and the Queensland Theatre Company, and Michael Gow is directing in a way that reflects how much German theatre he has absorbed over the last ten years or so. I’ve only seen a little myself, but I’m familiar with the territory.

The Cremorne is the smallest of the three theatres in the Queensland Performing Arts Centre. We share the green room and its bar with the other two companies performing here at present. In the larger Playhouse Theatre they are performing David Williamson’s gentle, whimsical drama Travelling North, and in the largest of the three, the Lyric, My Fair Lady. As we slosh down the corridor in our blood-soaked T-shirts and jeans, our heads and hands dripping with gore, we run into the musical’s chorus, impeccable in grey toppers and ostrich plumes, tripping upstairs to perform ‘Ascot Gavotte’. We grin and wave at each other.

It’s not uncommon for ticket-holders to wander into the wrong theatre by mistake. It strikes me that they wouldn’t be far into Titus before thinking, ‘This doesn’t look like My Fair Lady . . .’ And this causes me to ruminate a little on audience expectations and the many different things people require from a night at the theatre.

Most people simply want a good night out, whether it’s a toe-tapping musical or taut contemporary drama—something a touch spectacular and not too obfuscating. Throw in a harbour view and a couple of glasses of bubbly and punters are happy to fork out the dollars. Entertainment of this sort is, by definition, reassuring, comfy and fairly predictable. You more or less know the boundaries. Your imagination and assumptions may be challenged a little but you’ll always come home to a safe place.

There are other kinds of theatre that are deliberately not reassuring or comfy. They aim to disconcert us, shatter our preconceptions, offend our notions of what is appropriate. They want to change the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we define ‘art’. These forms of theatre—or painting or music or literature—have a much smaller audience. But it’s an audience that is looking for something other than ‘entertainment’.

Art can help us towards some resolution of the problems and questions that assail us. In times of trouble and chaos we are drawn to drama that deals with conflict in order to see that conflict aired and somehow resolved. Picasso, for example, challenged our academic notions of form and beauty, and many painters since, like Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning, have been determined to yank us out of our comfort zone. Theatre of the Absurd challenges our notion of an ordered and meaningful universe, showing us instead a cosmos that is godless and meaningless. We have to find new answers to the questions of who we are and what we are doing here. This kind of theatre has a place too. It may provoke hostility and outrage, but it’s important that it exists.

So I’m sitting here backstage, waiting for my entrance, caked in fake blood and taking part in a play that is brutal, nihilistic and offensive according to all criteria of ‘good taste’. And it’s thrilling. I can sense that the audience is getting off on it: this is not another ‘nice night at the theatre’.

But it’s Shakespeare, and Shakespeare is classic—revered by academia, taught in schools, quoted by bishops and headmasters, it is the touchstone of English culture and high art.

Is there a discrepancy here? Can Shakespeare be respectable high art and at the same time fodder for theatre that is grossly offensive, challenging and nihilistic? And why is he the most popular playwright of all time? Why is that popularity still growing? And why have I devoted most of my life to studying and performing his work? Why is it endlessly fascinating?

It has been said many times that Shakespeare is a wonderful guide to the workings of the heart and mind. Philosophers and psychologists have marvelled at his perceptive analysis of human behaviour. Even more striking is the variety of his understanding: how he achieves that mix of good and evil, comedy and tragedy, cruelty and compassion that makes his work so true to life, so close to how we know the world to be. His plays are built on paradoxes—for every winner there is a loser, one man’s tragedy is comedy to another. Add to all this the fact that he is not preachy or didactic, nor is he judgmental. This means that the plays are essentially open-ended, capable of various interpretations and, therefore, controversial. There is an ambivalence about the plays that is reflected in the enigmatic nature of their author, all of which causes endless speculation, rival schools of commentary and productions that are wildly different from each other.

Then, of course, there is his language, striking in its originality, in the boldness of his juxtaposition of unlikely words, the range of his metaphor and imagery, the pounding or subtle rhythms of his verse that can stir the blood or soothe the savage beast. With words on a page or actors standing on an empty stage, he can create empires, deserts and magical islands. Like his contemporary Ben Jonson, he is a critic of humanity, but a milder one. He has the compassion of Chekhov but inhabits a much larger universe. He can be as political as Brecht but is more effective because he is not dogmatic. And he can be as satirical as Molière, but more profound, with a romantic, lyrical element that is absent in the work of his French counterpart. Unlike Dickens, he is never sentimental, but he can be equally indignant over injustice. For all his empathy he can be merciless in his assessment of human folly. His work is, as the Polish critic Jan Kott puts it, ‘cruel but true’.

As an actor or director you have a special privilege when it comes to working with Shakespeare. When you rehearse you interrogate him, hold a dialogue with him, try to get inside his mind. You embody all those voices he had inside his head. You share the rage he felt when he has Philo exclaim of Antony:

. . . his captain’s heart,

Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst

The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper,

And is become the bellows and the fan

To cool a gypsy’s lust . . .

You can see him curl his lip in contempt as he pens the words of Coriolanus:

You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate

As reek o’ the rotten fens . . .

You can feel his heart swell with emotion as he has King Harry exclaim:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers . . .

And you are swept up in the wave of joy he experienced when he has Rosalind cry:

O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz,

That thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love!

Reading a novel, you are on the outside looking in. When you perform Shakespeare, you are his collaborator—you are up there on the stage with him, you enter into his mind and heart and bring his creations to life, give them a body and a voice.

I have said Shakespeare was not didactic, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from him. He can teach us to look at the big picture, to stand back from a situation and see all sides of an argument. He teaches us to be sceptical about received wisdom, men’s motives and human institutions. He shows us how history is not made according to some grand design but by fallible people, their follies and ambitions. He encourages us to rejoice in the marvellousness of humankind, to identify with nature, to value the precious brevity of life and to accept the inevitability of the life cycle. He demonstrates a sympathy for the common man and invites us to walk in his shoes awhile. He teaches us to revel in the wonderment of language, the ecstasy of poetry, the power of rhetoric and how it can shape destinies. And he introduces us to the joy of playing, of make-believe, of inhabiting universes of the imagination.

He has opened up vistas for us, and our lives are diminished if we do not venture there.