When William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, a brutal and bloody play about power, violence and vengeance was first performed in the early 1590s, audiences expected to seeing young men playing the women’s roles on stage.

Today, cross-gender casting is the exception, rather than the norm; but that hasn’t stopped director Michael Gow casting male actors as women in Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome, a reworking of the Bard of Avon’s bloodiest play by German playwright Heiner Müller.

Müller, who died in 1995, was one of Germany’s greatest 20th century playwrights. He was also internationally acclaimed: after the death of Samuel Beckett, he was heralded as ‘theatre’s greatest living poet’ by New York’s weekly newspaper, The Village Voice.

Initially a star of the East German arts establishment, Müller later fell from grace, and his work was censored by the state, at which point he began reworking classic texts in order to explore contemporary themes.

Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome is one such adaptation. Shakespeare’s goriest play is set in Rome in the aftermath of a brutal war between the Romans and the Goths, and sees patrician general Titus Andronicus returning home victorious, only to find himself caught up in a sordid web of political intrigue and personal upheaval.

“Heiner Müller uses another writer’s world to comment on his own,” says Michael Gow, the director of Bell Shakespeare’s production of Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome. “He takes Shakespeare’s early, blood-soaked tragedy and comments on it with his own poetry to reflect on the violence of imperial power. His searingly provocative examination of the nature of violence in our modern world will resonate profoundly with a 21st century audience.”

Actor Thomas Campbell, who plays Titus’ hapless daughter Lavinia in the new production, says the play polarises the audience like no other work he’s performed in before.

“I’ve never been in a production where the response has been so diverse,” he tells CANVAS.

“Some people have said it’s the most incredible thing they’ve ever seen, and others say they didn’t feel anything. I really don’t care, because I’d rather be in a production where people have such a strong response than just go ‘that was good’.”

The play’s impact on the audience is one of the reasons Gow has cast male actors in the play’s female roles, Campbell explains.

“What happens to Lavinia is that she’s raped and mutilated, her tongue is chopped out and her hands chopped off; and audience members have said that it’s very confronting watching a male playing a female having that done to ‘her’, but actually watching a woman on stage having that done to her would be almost impossible, lots of female audiences have said.”

While approximately 75 percent of the play is still recognisably Titus Andronicus, a quarter of the work is what Campbell describes as “this modern-day commentary that Muller’s provided for the audience, so that they’re constantly reminded what they’re watching; reminded of the atrocities that are still happening in the world today.

“He wrote this in the 1980s when there was a lot of stuff happening around him in Germany, and so in the end, the production is constantly alienating the audience, reminding them of what they’re watching and what the references are; and because of that Gow’s also cast men as women; it’s a kind of an alienating tactic.”

The staging of Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome, with its stark, bare set reminiscent of a jail cell, further adds to the production’s unsettling atmosphere; as does the amount of fake blood that’s liberally splashed around throughout from a bucket sitting centre stage.

“This bucket of blood is kind of the one prop that we have,” says Campbell, “and it starts to fly around the stage quite quickly, as soon as the killings start to happen. It’s all very stylistic, the murders and the rapes and stuff; there’s no fake little knives being shoved into people, it’s just ‘put your hand in the bucket and therefore your hand’s chopped off’, or throw the blood at someone’s face that’s a slashing in their face.

“It’s pretty stylistic but I think it works extremely well.”

Bell Shakespeare’s Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome at The Malthouse – Merlyn Theatre, Wednesday November 26 – Saturday December 6. Bookings 9685 5111 or malthousetheatre.com.au