A gender for change

Ed Hall bounds into the Old Vic looking a decade younger than his 40 years and full of energy despite the fact he spent Christmas rehearsing. He's a busy man: even as we meet, he's fielding calls about his next project in the West End. Before then, though, there's the small matter of Shakespeare's The Taming Of The Shrew and Twelfth Night in a double bill at Kevin Spacey's Old Vic with his all-male theatre company Propeller.

Yep, that's right: an all-male cast performing one play considered prohibitively misogynistic by some and another whose pivotal plot device means in this version there'll be men playing women dressed up as boys falling in love with men. Crikey.

Hall isn't remotely fazed by this - and not just because of the obvious fact that Shakespeare's plays were originally performed by men. 'Look,' he says patiently, as though he were explaining something very simple to a small child. 'If you've got an all-male cast, the audience tends to stop looking at the actor and start concentrating on the language. It points up the artifice of what you are seeing. You realise that it's a performance, a spectacle. Correspondingly, it's easier to suspend your disbelief.'

Hall has established himself as quite distinct from the legend of his father, Sir Peter. Where Hall senior is renowned for a lucid, cerebral style, Hall junior's directorial efforts have throbbed with a visceral, gutsy energy. Propeller came about almost by accident after he staged an experimental all-male production of Henry V at Newbury's Watermill Theatre (now their base) in 1997, which reimagined the play through the eyes of football louts. Rose Rage followed in 2001; his adaptation of the Henry VI plays, in which he emphasised the bloody destruction of civil war by setting the action in an abattoir and filling the stage with real meat and offal.

The company itself sounds rather good fun: everyone pitches in; there's no hierarchy; it tours abroad relentlessly; and the members have got into several scrapes. Once in Mexico they were mistaken for Zapatistas because they were wearing balaclavas. They rarely bother much with cumbersome sets and props, either. 'We're very light on our feet,' says Hall. 'We used to carry our set with us through airport terminals. And Shakespeare's plays were originally performed by actors' companies: there was no director as such. Although I do have to shove my oar in sometimes.'

Still, while Propeller sounds as though it has a high old time, The Taming Of The Shrew is no walk in the park. It has been called barbaric for the savage torture Petruchio inflicts on his wife Kate to make her submit to his will. But it's also performed surprisingly often: the Shakespeare's Globe theatre even successfully staged an all-female version. It's like a scab we can't stop picking. So how does an all-male cast affect that power dynamic between Kate and Petruchio?

'For one thing, the actors playing Petruchio and Kate are both physically fit people,' says Hall. 'The level of their physical engagement is intense; the play lives on a visceral, emotional level. Nonetheless, having a man play Kate means you don't get so obsessed over whether they love each other, which has been a big moral stumbling block in the past. Instead, by the end of the play, it has become clear that Kate has no choice and that Shakespeare is making a critical comment about that lack of choice. Marriage was something in which women were bought and sold: in those days, no one married who they loved. It's a play about arranged marriages, not about courtly love.'

Hall has directed many more plays outside Propeller: he was involved in his father's epic staging of John Barton's Tantalus plays at the Barbican in 2001; he staged a successful A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum at the National in 2004; he is also a former associate director of the RSC. But he keeps coming back to Shakespeare, although he bristles at the suggestion that the Bard has inspired his best work.

He's also fascinated by gender and why we are so hung up on it. 'We think we live in a more permissive age but the Elizabethans were much more fluid about ideas of sexuality and gender,' he argues. 'I hope at some point it won't be an issue, that the issue will be about love and compassion.

'In Twelfth Night, Orsino's love for Cesario [a disguised Viola] is a touching and beautiful thing, which has no homoerotic overtones.