When Ensemble Theatre Company’s Tariq Leslie asked Richard Wolfe to direct a play for his ambitious summer series by Jericho Beach, Wolfe likely never expected the script he’d offer him. It was Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain, a play as rarely staged as it is challenging and controversial.

“I thought, ‘Well, that’s an adventure!’ ” Wolfe, who first met Leslie directing him at the Shaw Festival, says over the phone from his Pi Theatre headquarters, where he’s artistic director. “My favourite artistic experience is when I leave the theatre feeling energized and alive, where I have an experience I can think about for more than a couple hours, and where I can feel emotionally engaged in it. And I thought, ‘This is a play that does that.’ ”

That, and much more. In the 1980 work, the British playwright weaves together three historical episodes of violence and oppression: the Roman invasion of the Celtic world; the Saxon attack on Romano-Celtic Britain; and British troops’ interventions during the Northern Ireland conflict. By connecting each era’s barbaric acts, Brenton poses stark moral and political questions.

It is a massive undertaking for the ETC team, though the four-year-old repertory festival has proven itself fearless in previous eclectic programming that has included everything from the macabre Jacobean work The Duchess of Malfi to Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour. The Romans in Britain is its own kind of challenge, though, jumping between 55 BC, AD 500, and 1980, and originally calling for 30 actors to portray 60 characters.

“We have 17 actors, so there’ll be a lot of doubling and tripling,” Wolfe explains, adding he’ll also be staging it in the round. “It should be an interesting psychological experiment for the audience.…I’ve got actors sitting around in plain view of the audience the whole time, and I think it works in this play. Brenton’s work—and particularly this play—has powerful language, exciting characters, and a lot of action and dark comedy.”

Most infamously, it contains a scene of brutal assault by Roman soldiers against a young Druid priest that got the play’s first director charged, somehow, with gross indecency in Britain in 1982. “That director could have spent two or three years in prison, so it was not a light thing,” Wolfe says, pointing out it was a private prosecution by a Christian morality crusader and was later dropped. Attitudes have changed a lot in the ensuing few decades: “When I see the more violent video games or even some episodes of South Park, I wonder what is offensive to people these days.”

He adds: “I was really clear with the actors that none of this stuff is gratuitous. We went through the script line by line to identify the real motivations of what was on the page.”

Despite the unfortunate episode, the play is often grouped, he points out, with works like 1958’s Look Back in Anger and 1995’s Blasted (which Wolfe directed at Pi Theatre, winning him a 2015 Jessie Award) as a benchmark in modern British drama. And its relevance to today’s events, from Syria to Guantanamo Bay to the U.S. election, is heavy. Consider Caesar’s cold line in the play “Even a little massacre must look like policy.”

“One thing that’s moved me is the play itself is largely about imperialism and abuse of power,” Wolfe explains. “It was an effort to show British people a reflection of themselves as being the occupied, and how history includes them as an oppressed people and also as oppressors. So as the play unfolds, we see the cycle of violence and oppression, laced with a lot of dark comedy, in a way. In the end the thing that got me more engaged than anything was that the characters were conducting the crimes with such a laissez-faire attitude. It’s that laissez-faire attitude to violence we’re associated with, as a nation. It’s dangerous when we try to distance ourselves from the psychological pain people might feel having an association with violence committed in our name.”

As Wolfe digs into the play more and more, he simply can’t wait to see the reaction to it. “In a way it might be interesting to see the effect it has on people who are unsuspecting—people who think they are going into a historical drama,” he says with a slight laugh.

“For anyone interested in the theatre, it’s certainly an opportunity to see something you won’t get the chance to see otherwise.”

The Ensemble Theatre Company summer series runs from Thursday (July 14) to August 20.