The yes man

Here he is. One of Britain’s leading young directors. Tall, sturdily built, mid-thirties, with a mop of thick dark hair and a starter beer gut obtruding discreetly beneath the woolly slopes of his green jumper. Ed Hall, son of Sir Peter, is best known as the founder of Propeller, a company that specialises in all-male productions of Shakespeare. He takes a seat opposite me and his shiny popping-out eyes give his round face the genial eagerness of a well-fed spaniel. We tuck into our lunch and he answers my questions with rambling, effusive paragraphs of luvvie-speak which are engaging, easy on the ear and at times faintly earnest.

We begin by discussing his latest venture at ‘the Vic’ (as he calls the Old Vic) where Propeller’s finest blades are about to stage back-to-back productions of Twelfth Night and Shrew (as he calls The Taming of the Shrew). ‘Why those two?’ ‘We wanted to look at an earlier and a later play where the themes of love seem to be at their centre.’ Fair enough. I refrain from probing deeper into the ramifications of this coupling for fear of turning the interview into a doctoral thesis on ‘The Dormant Zeitgeist of Elizabethan Gender Politics’. Instead I ask about the Old Vic’s boss, Kevin Spacey. The reply breaks over me like a tsunami of schmooze. ‘I’d seen his wonderful Richard Two before Christmas last year and we had dinner after and we were talking about all sorts of ideas and I went away and I thought actually I would really like to do this double-bill project but I can’t do it on my own so I went to see Kevin in the New Year and suggested it to him and there are very few people in my career who’ve turned round and just said “Yes”.