Edward Hall – Favourite Things

Each week Reaction Weekend brings you Favourite Things – interviews with interesting people about the skills, hobbies, pleasures and past times that make them who they are.

Edward Hall is an award-winning director. Hall founded the Propeller Theatre Company and is Artistic Director of Hampstead Theatre, the internationally renowned hub for new writing that has brought us television including the new series of Gentleman Jack for the BBC. Hall’s directorial debut on the big screen, Blithe Spirit, starring Dame Judi Dench, Dan Stevens, Leslie Mann and Isla Fisher, is available on Sky Cinema and Now TV from Friday 15th January.

These are a few of his favourite things…

The Breakfast Bed

I call it “the breakfast bed” as this is the occasional weekend event when my family gather for what has become my favourite moment in the hurly burly of life. It comprises of my eldest daughter at one end of the bed, firing the crossword clues, my wife and youngest daughter on either side of me, our cat purring on one side and our dog Dennis lying upside down on the other. Coffee, tea and croissants are usually in abundance and perhaps the radio burbles quietly in the background. It’s the most important moment of my week and gives a breath of precious security in an increasingly uncertain world.

Assen TT

My biggest vice since the tender age of eight has been spending as much time on two wheels as possible. I have bashed, crashed and sometimes raced most kinds of two wheeled machines and until recently, still kept my riding skills sharp with the occasional day on track. Nowadays, I spend more time on my bicycle which gives the same sense of freedom as the motorbike, just not so fast. I live for the annual pilgrimage to the Assen TT circuit in The Netherlands with my wife Issy (who is Dutch) where we watch our hero Valentino Rossi carve his way round a racetrack. The event attracts hundreds of thousands of mad Dutch fans. There is something about the synthesis of the madness of racing and the madness of the Dutch which creates the perfect weekend full of adrenaline and surprises. Where else would you pull into a garage to fill up and discover a hundred other bikes filling up too, and in the middle, a huge American Cadillac being filled up by a dude looking like Frank Zappa, lit joint dangling from his lip. Shooting the breeze with a cop…

Travel (on two wheels or in four)

 To travel is mostly, as they say, better than to arrive. I love a road trip and seize any opportunity I can to disappear towards the nearest horizon on two wheels or in four. I knew after bringing my then fiancée back from Italy on the bike in the most unbelievable storm (which lasted hours and hours) without a word of complaint that I had found a soulmate. Twenty years later, we have driven Highway one, ridden the windy roads of Europe and explored some of the highways of South Africa. Recently, we found much to our delight that a weekend in Bruges turned out to be closer than travelling to Leeds. And so, the catchphrase has stuck in our house – “Bruges, closer than Leeds!” Any journey for me brings with it an expectation of something new, and with that a sense of hope and discovery.

Loud music and its emotional energy

Listening to loud and extreme music always takes me out of myself and lets me get lost in my thoughts. I have a very eclectic taste, from Mozart to Metallica, but with it comes a love of pushing boundaries. A love of extremes. The energy, heat and emotion of an intense song or sonata lifts me away from intellectual thought, cleansing and refreshing as it goes. This has become increasingly important to me as so often if I’m planning or filming, my brain struggles to switch off and recharge as I’m constantly answering questions and making plans. The pure emotional connection of music, like dance, gives me huge emotional energy.

Footlights and fantasies

The older I get and the more I direct, the more I have become aware of what an extraordinary church the theatre is. Here is a place where the most complex of issues can be discussed, debated and felt, where we can learn how to live. If faith and religion is a way of understanding our environment whilst learning how to create healthy communities, then I can’t think of anywhere else that does this in a more sophisticated way than the theatre. Perhaps the Greeks really did understand this better than anyone, and it is this that envelops me when I stand in the centre of the fifteen thousand seat amphitheatre that is Epidavrous in Greece. The sense of community and connection this provides to a civilisation thousands of years old helps me appreciate how theatre lives beyond time and space, civilising our lives.