Daily Inspiration Quote by Edward Hall

Theatre, in Edward Hall's framing, isn’t a sandbox for cleverness; it’s a contract. Audiences show up with an emotional demand - "excited and uplifted" - and he positions himself as the one obligated to pay it back, with interest. The phrasing is briskly transactional: people "come" for a purpose, and the artist's job is to deliver. That insistence on outcome (not process, not experimentation, not ambiguity) tells you what kind of cultural moment this belongs to: one where attention is scarce, tickets are expensive, and entertainment is competing with everything from streaming to doomscrolling. "Inspire" becomes the premium product.

There’s subtext in the slight narrowing of theatre’s possibilities. He doesn’t mention challenge, discomfort, or provocation - the classic defenses of difficult art. Instead he embraces theatre as a mood-altering machine, a civic stimulant. That can read as generous, even democratic: he’s refusing the insider posture that treats bafflement as sophistication. It’s also a quiet assertion of control. If the audience is there to be uplifted, the director becomes a kind of emotional engineer, designing an experience with a target feeling.

The odd contextual wrinkle is the attribution: a lawyer. Coming from that profession, the line sounds even more like advocacy than bohemian manifesto. Lawyers persuade, frame, win rooms. Hall’s sentence has the cadence of a closing argument for theatre’s public value - not art for art’s sake, but art as social utility, pitched in language that funders, boards, and busy people can accept without feeling tested.