THERE'S a reason guests on Desert Island Discs are offered The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare alongside their choice of a record and a luxury item – and it's not because three of the plays feature shipwrecks. It's because no single body of work better charts the multiple complexities of human existence, and because nothing else in literature feels so fresh and modern as a result. Even those apparently old-fashioned stories about shipwrecks retain an uncanny potency: turn on a television today and you'll likely see news footage of stricken vessels spilling refugees into the Mediterranean, or foreign shorelines covered with people and possessions.

Topical events have always brought various Shakespeare works in and out of focus, of course. But there is one play which for the last 100 years has seemed desperately and constantly relevant. If the period covering the 20th and early 21st centuries is the era of the great dictator, to use the title of Charlie Chaplin's 1940 film about fascism, then it is also the era of Macbeth, the brave general who dreams and schemes and turns to tyranny and murder to keep his fingers on the ultimate prize: power. The result, inevitably, is chaos.

We "get" Macbeth in part because we've learned about Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Idi Amin, Papa Doc and the rest. Because we've watched the fall of Ceausescu and Gaddafi. Because we've seen Goodfellas and The Godfather and any number of other gangster films where violence begets more violence. “Blood will have blood,” Macbeth says. And from the Armenian genocide to the Holocaust and the current war in Syria, from The Troubles to the Balkans to the simmering hatreds of the West Bank, our recent history is steeped in the stuff.

With the same period being the era of the moving image, and Macbeth also ranking as Shakespeare's shortest and most action-friendly tragedy, it's no surprise that film-makers have regularly turned to it.

Amazingly, there were eight versions in the silent era alone, seven of them having been produced before 1916, when producer DW Griffith offered his take on the story. They weren't all American either: despite being at war at the time (or because of it?), the French produced a version in 1915 starring Severin-Mars as Macbeth and Georgette Leblanc as his wife.

A century on, the latest Macbeth is about to hit the screens, and this time it's Michael Fassbender in the title role and another French actress, Marion Cotillard, as Lady Macbeth. The director is an Australian, Justin Kurzel, who cut his teeth in theatre (he once worked on a production of Macbeth) and made his debut with 2011 film Snowtown. Macbeth is only his second feature. It's quite a subject to tackle.

Kurzel's take on the character of Macbeth himself will be familiar to anyone with a friend of relative who has served in the recent conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan: he portrays him as a returning soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition thought to afflict one in five veterans of the war in Iraq. Symptoms don't tend to include regicide, but flashbacks, visions, insomnia and uncontrollable outbursts are all common. If you know the play, you'll know that Shakespeare hands them all to Macbeth and his slowly-unravelling wife.

"Fractured" is how Kurzel describes those two main characters. "It felt much more like Macbeth was coming from a place or a point of view of a soldier, and that there was also the suggestion of them having lost a child and of them being surrounded by grief," he says. "There was just something unbelievably desperate about the characters – it fed into this incredible thing about using ambition and acting on prophecy more as a way of replacing a void in their lives, and a way of surviving."

For the notoriously fastidious Fassbender, the PTSD angle was key to unlocking the character. "That changed everything for me," he said in an interview at the Cannes Film Festival, where Macbeth showed in competition. "We know from soldiers today coming back from Iraq or Afghanistan that describe post-traumatic stress disorder and the fact that they have these hallucinations. They can be walking down the street ... and the next thing, it's Basra."

Another aspect of the work that Kurzel has given a modern sheen is the Macbeths' childlessness. One of the great puzzles of the work is Lady Macbeth's famous line about having "given suck", yet the couple have no children. Indeed aspects of the plot hang on the fact.

"I felt that that was very human, and felt very contemporary," says Kurzel. "I guess it just led from there – it helped in starting to find the vision of the film, and the psychology of the characters.”

There are universal themes in there too, however. "What's done is done," Lady Macbeth says at one point in the play, and as much as the work is about tyranny and ambition, so is it about regret, misgiving, guilt and self-deception. Macbeth takes his wife's advice and quite literally soldiers on through it all, bringing his own end closer with every new outrage. But though she tries to face them down, Lady Macbeth is haunted by the couple's actions and their consequences.

Kurzel's version is refreshingly traditional in the sense that it doesn't update the action at all. Post-traumatic stress disorder or not, the game of thrones in which Macbeth takes part is played out in a medieval Scotland of wind and rain. And although Kurzel does make a nod to another sort of film genre – his script read "very much like a Western", he says; "it was very heavily influenced by landscape" – it's hard not to see the influence of Game Of Thrones itself in his realisation.

Mind you, if that's the case then Kurzel is simply taking back some of what Games Of Thrones author George RR Martin has already borrowed. Critics and fans alike have noted the many Shakespearean elements to the fantasy epic and speaking at last year's Edinburgh International Book Festival about his inspiration for the character of one prominent female character, Martin cited Lady Macbeth as an example of "strong women who didn’t put on chain-mail bikinis to go forth into battle, but exercised immense powers by other ways". And no, the character in question isn't the evil Cersei Lannister, played by Lena Headey in the HBO series, though her character is equally manipulative and scheming.

However many other directors of both theatre and film have updated the look of their Macbeths, seeing the staging of the play as another way to comment on their own times. A 2006 Australian version used the backdrop of a series of gangland killings to set the play in the Melbourne underworld, and a 1954 British-American production called Joe MacBeth did the same but put it into the era of Al Capone and Murder Inc.

Anglo-Scottish playwright Peter Moffat, who would go on to create The Village, wrote a 2005 version which cast James McAvoy as a ruthless chef trying to take over a three star Michelin restaurant. This was pre-financial crisis, of course, back when we still cared about fine dining. And in theatre, meanwhile, Scottish director Dominic Hill's celebrated 2004 production at Dundee Rep placed the action in the Balkans conflict: an easy sell given that Mira Markovic, wife of jailed Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, had long been dubbed "the Lady Macbeth of the Balkans".

These sorts of Shakespearean updates are a longstanding tradition in themselves. The first "modern" adaptation is judged to have been a 1923 production of Cymbeline staged at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre by innovative director Barry Jackson. Macbeth soon followed and Jackson is notable for nurturing the careers of Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Peggy Ashcroft, Julie Christie, Albert Finney and Derek Jacobi among others.

But the most famous early update of Macbeth was the one staged by an enfant terrible of the American theatre at Harlem's LaFayette Theatre in April, 1936. His name was Orson Welles and his "Voodoo Macbeth" has gone down in history not just because it featured an all-black cast but because it transposed the action from medieval Scotland to Haiti during the reign of Henri Christophe, a former slave and leader of the Haitian rebellion which culminated in the founding of the Republic of Haiti in 1804.

Welles's production was a sensation – "a superb ballet of ruin and death," said author and film-maker Jean Cocteau after he had watched it – but it was never thought to have been filmed until many years later when four minutes of footage surfaced in a government documentary about African-American life. As well as changing the setting, Welles upped the otherworldly element of the play, saying at the time that it "falls beautifully into the supernatural atmosphere of Haitian voodoo”. In the footage, you can see the final four minutes of the production and a closing scene, lifted from early in the play but often cut from theatrical productions, in which Hecate, the Queen of the Witches, appears.

A decade later, in 1947, Welles made a film version, the first by a major Hollywood studio since the silent era. By then Shakespeare was back in vogue after the success of Laurence Olivier's politically-charged Henry V in 1944 and when Welles was at work on Macbeth, Olivier was shooting his Hamlet. As he had in 1936, Welles took huge liberties with the text and ramped up the supernatural element, adding extra scenes with the witches and having them construct a voodoo doll of Macbeth out of clay. It collapses and crumbles when Macbeth dies. For Welles, then, the film was about "the struggle between the old and new religions. I saw the witches as representatives of a Druidical pagan religion suppressed by Christianity".

But others have found in Macbeth not a lightning rod for the tumult of their times or an essay on order and disorder but a reflection of some deep personal tragedy. The most infamous example is Roman Polanski's 1971 version, popularly believed to have been made in response to the 1969 murder of his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, by members of the so-called Manson Family.

At the time of the killing, Polanski had been in the UK scouting locations for a sci-fi movie he was due to make. Instead of making that film he turned to the theatre critic and author Kenneth Tynan for help in adapting "the Scottish play" for the stage. Some critics suggest the project was already underway to some degree before Tate's death. True or not, it's clear the gruesome episodes of murder and infanticide will have had a deep resonance for the director. Perhaps most ghastly of all is the scene in which Macduff, exiled in England, is told by Ross that his castle has been attacked and his wife and children murdered. "All my pretty ones?" he asks. "At one fell swoop?" It's where we get the phrase and in the mind of contemporary filmgoers at least it's the moment Macbeth becomes Manson.

There's a line in cult 1980s comedy Withnail & I where Withnail's Uncle Monty, an ageing gay man who says he once had a passion for the stage, talks about the moment he realised he would "never play the Dane". He means Hamlet, of course, for many still the juiciest of Shakespearean roles.

Benedict Cumberbatch is just the latest in a long line of stellar names to have gone where Uncle Monty never did and step into the Prince of Denmark's stage slippers. But it's notable that the man hailed as the pre-eminent actor of his generation for his fierce and intense performances in films like Hunger, Shame and 12 Years A Slave should opt instead for Macbeth. Perhaps, with Oscar season looming and many critics already attaching his name to the prize, it's simply a sign of Fassbender's own vaulting ambition. In which case, may the outcome be a little less gory for him than it was the for the notorious Scottish king he plays.

Macbeth is released on October 2