The act of murder in Shakespeare's plays, suggests the Young Vic's new artistic director, David Lan, often has parallels with the sexual act. Think of the procrastination of Hamlet, the planning of regicide by the Macbeths, the build-up to the killing of Julius Caesar. In both Macbeth and Julius Caesar there is a gulf between what the murderers think they are going to achieve by homicide, and what they actually do achieve. Reality doesn't live up to expectation. When desire is spent there is only emptiness.
"It's like sex," says Lan. A lot of the time you are anxious that you should do it and obsessed by the need to do it. Then you do it and it's great. But afterwards you think, 'What was that all about?' There is a kind of melancholy."
The brochure for the Young Vic's new season, advertising Lan's production of Julius Caesar, shows three male torsos. The models' heads are either cut off or turned away so as not to detract from the rippling muscles.
It is a startling sight. You tend to think of Julius Caesar as an old man's play, a gift for a trio of elderly actors physically past their prime. But Shakespeare was still a relatively young man in his early 30s when he wrote it. It is, suggests Lan, the last young play of a young playwright.
There is more to the Young Vic's marketing strategy than just an advertising campaign in the style of those English National Opera posters a few years back that tried to persuade a doubtful public that opera has nothing to do with fat people singing and everything to do with sex. Lan's proposition is that Julius Caesar as a play about active soldiers, young men bound by friendship and love and destroyed by it. What interests him is the evident absorption of Shakespeare in the relationships between the main characters.
By casting Dorian Healy as Julius Caesar, Marcus D'Amico as Cassius and Lloyd Owen as Brutus - all good-looking actors in their 30s - he seems likely to come up with a production that will challenge our preconception that Julius Caesar is primarily a political play. But while Lan is keen to explore the sensuality of the play and the psychological detail of what he calls "this grown-up male drama", this is certainly not an attempt to stage the first gay Julius Caesar. Lan is far too perceptive for such a crudity.
The South African-born Lan, who trained as an actor and then came to Britain aged 20, has always had the capacity to surprise. Even his appointment earlier this year as the successor to Tim Supple at the Young Vic came out of the blue. This, after all, is a man with only two directorial credits to his name in this country - a widely ignored production of The Glass Menagerie at Watford in 1998, and a superb 'Tis Pity She's a Whore with Jude Law at the Young Vic last autumn.
Until Lan took that Jacobean thriller and turned it inside out, he was mainly known in the theatre world as a playwright. In another incarnation he was an anthropologist, spending two years in the 1980s living in a small village in the Zambezi studying the effects of the guerrilla war on religious beliefs of the local community.
Out of that came a classic anthropological text, Guns and Rain: Guerillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe, and Desire, a beautiful, wonderfully unfashionable play about possession and the exorcism of guilt. It premiered at the Almeida in 1990 and completed a trilogy begun 10 years previously, which encompassed shamanism and Melanesian cargo cults. As Stephen Daldry of the Royal Court has noted, even when he began his writing career back in the 1970s, Lan "was never part of the dominant ethos which suggested that a playwright's responsibility was to depict and analyse contemporary life in, say, Brixton or Moss Side".
Some years ago a critic, reviewing one of Lan's plays, observed that Lan's was a theatrical career that had never quite coalesced. But everything seems to be coming together nicely now, as the various strands of Lan's long apprenticeship in the theatre and life begin to tie up. Anthropology and theatre have much in common, not least in the way that they explore the nature of ritual. But Lan's own plays are only the tip of an iceberg in a career that includes documentary film-making, translation (his new version of The Cherry Orchard premieres at the National Theatre the night after Julius Caesar opens), extensive work with playwrights and screenwriters and two years spent as writer in residence at the Royal Court in the mid-1990s. Here he became the unsung hero of the new-writing boom, nurturing scripts through the process from development to final production. "Your brief," Daldry told Lan, "is to do what ever you like until you meet resistance."
"I worked with people on the basis that there was no deal," Lan recalls. "I'd be around as long as people wanted me to be there and then I wouldn't. It worked. On many plays I became an unofficial producer."
Without that experience at the Court, Lan would never have considered applying for the Young Vic job. But working closely with Daldry may stand Lan in good stead in other ways, if his ambitious plans for the Young Vic are to be realised. The redevelopment of the Court is testament to the fact that Daldry has no equal in British theatre when it comes to fundraising. "I learned such a lot from Stephen. How could one not? If we're going to rebuild, I need to learn more."
At 48, Lan considers himself too old to be running the Young Vic. He would like it to return to its original ethos of being a theatre where the young inspire the young. "I want 27-year-olds directing King Lear," he says, while pointing out that the current funding situation means that the theatre can only produce three or four in-house shows every year. That, and the need to generate 60% of the theatre's income from the box office, means that Lan has already discovered that "the pressure to be conservative is great".
Then there is the small problem that the building is falling down even faster now than it was 30 years ago, when the first schemes to rebuild it were hatched. None have ever come to fruition, in part because nobody has ever come up with a way to improve upon the current auditorium, one of the most attractive spaces in the country. But if anyone can get the job done, Lan has to be the man, not least because for him the Young Vic is a passion, whereas for his much younger predecessors Tim Supple and David Thacker it was also a career move. Lan didn't need to run a theatre, he just wanted to, and it wasn't any theatre he wanted to run, but the Young Vic in particular.
In the publicity for Julius Caesar, Lan poses questions about the way "some men lead and others follow" and "the enchantment of power", an anthropologist's concept if ever there was one. I wonder whether his nine months at the Young Vic have given him an insight into that enchantment.
He smiles, looking pale as a ghost and completely exhausted. "I knew in the abstract that this was a big job, but the abstract became concrete very quickly. The thing I've really learned is that as quickly as you put things together they fall apart."
Julius Caesar opens at the Young Vic, London SE1, tonight. Box office: 020-7926 6363.
