You know that the Royal Shakespeare Company,” says Gregory Doran, “has lasted longer than Shakespeare’s players were ever together. We have to get back to our core values, a community of shared ideas, to show a belief in the power of these plays and their power to express themselves in the world we’re living in.”

Alarmingly long-haired and bearded, Doran is talking to me over slow-roasted lamb at the Dirty Duck, in Stratford-upon-Avon. This is amazing, not because of what he is saying, but because I am listening. When it comes to the claims of the RSC, I have, for years, been stone-deaf.

You see, for luvvie-loathers like me, the Royal Shakespeare Company has always been one of life’s great comic consolations. Conceived in a moment of wild idealism in 1958, in a hotel bedroom in Leningrad, by Peter Hall and Sir Fordham Flower, it went on to become an imperially bloated monster, forever moaning and forever demanding more money, usually through the pages of The Guardian. When Trevor Nunn was its absentee director, actors used to write to Jim’ll Fix It in hopes of a meeting. Under Adrian Noble, the RSC shot itself in both feet before stepping on a rake by abandoning its London home at the Barbican without an alternative in sight, losing, in the process, its City of London subsidy and plunging into a dangerously high deficit from which it is still trying to recover. When you chuck in all those dreadful “experimental” productions in which poor old Will was simply deployed to feed contemporary vanity, what you seem to have here is a great argument — one among many — for towing British theatre out to sea and nuking it.

On the other hand, you don’t. The problem for us LLs is that, in spite of everything, the RSC does actually do very good shows. It is, amazingly in view of its congenital inability to organise a piss-up in a brewery, one of the few reliable theatrical operations around. If you want to see good Shakespeare, then the RSC is the only place in the world where you can be pretty sure of getting it. And that is saying a lot — everything, in fact.

But it has been, like the battle of Waterloo, a damned close-run thing. What has happened at the RSC is that, somehow, its institutional integrity has survived its managerial death wish. The reason is that good people — actors and directors — have always wanted to work there. Good people like Doran.

Doran directed the All’s Well That Ends Well that is now to transfer to the West End from Stratford. It is a dense and dark comedy that defies elucidation, experiment or even performance. It is more like a sonnet than a play. But Doran has triumphantly made it work. In fact, Doran — though his friend Michael Boyd actually got the job of artistic director after the departure of Noble — is making the RSC work. He is doing so by being very, very conservative, though he winces when I use the word. I guess he doesn’t want the luvvies to hear.

He’s 45, and for 17 years has been the companion of that great RSC actor Antony Sher. He was born in Huddersfield, although when he was six months old, the family moved to Preston. Apart from a pierrot grandmother, there wasn’t a trace of theatre in his background. But at a very early age, he heard an old 45rpm record of an American production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the die was cast.

“I’ll never forget that dreadful American Puck. I’ve been talking to Michael Boyd about doing Shakespeare for young children. They need to experience it before they are 13. I thought of doing hour-long versions of the plays for children aged between 8 and 12, before the cynicism kicks in.”

He became a complete Shakespeare nut, on one occasion seeing three productions of Macbeth in one day — the Roman Polanski film in the morning, a Liverpool Everyman touring production in the afternoon and one at the new arts centre in Preston in the evening. “I never thought of Shakespeare as difficult. To me, it was never difficult when people got up and spoke it. It was never meant to be studied; it was meant to be performed and watched.”

More difficult than Shakespeare was the feeling of being the only gay person in the world, a feeling he didn’t lose until he went to Bristol University to study English and drama. “The weird thing was that I came back for the holidays and I came out to my two best friends. One of them said: ‘Yes, so am I.’ Three years later, the other one told me he was also gay. It had been almost too traumatic — my best friends were gay and they’d been unable to tell each other.”

His sexuality colours his view of Shakespeare. He is, for example, much more comfortable than many with the bisexuality of the plays and sonnets. And his interpretation of All’s Well That Ends Well is that it is a dramatised version of the actual events that may have led to Shakespeare’s infatuation with the beautiful young man of the sonnets. He admits that this may be “all bollocks”, but it works as a way into this unremittingly dense and inscrutable play.

The other crucial aspect of Doran’s own biography is Catholicism. Again, this may give him a line to Shakespeare, who, many now believe, was a secret convert to Rome. Technically, Doran has left the faith, but he still carries a “God-shaped hole” around with him. “Faith has been such a large part of my life. Perhaps I’ve replaced God with Shakespeare. The sense of there being a higher faith, and of the necessity of faith, is certainly in the plays — perhaps not in a Catholic way, but in an aspirational way.

I don’t believe he was an ardent Catholic, but he might have been from a political point of view.”