Emma Hall remembers her father, Sir Peter

WHEN I WAS ABOUT SEVEN, I asked my Pa what exactly a director did. ‘Well,’ he said, eyes twinkling, ‘That’s a very good question.’ When he started describing everything he did to make a play, I was bewildered. It seemed impossible that anyone could conjure a collective experience simply through the force of their imagination.

Pa had an exceptional gift for making you feel as if you could do anything; people who worked with him always remark on how he could make unimaginable things happen. He fought ferociously for the work and the people he loved. Though he pioneered so much long before I was born – through a blizzard of animosity – he fought every day of his working life against the forces which were constantly, and persist in, threatening the arts.

I think my love of theatre was galvanised by these two aspects of him as a director: the magical, where he summoned living, breathing beings out of words lying on a page; and the political. It’s that sense of urgency that inspired me to co-found my theatre company, Antic Face. I knew that if I was going to make theatre (and God knows, it’s never been harder) that I wanted it to be political.

My mum, Nicki, can’t remember this picture being taken, but she thinks

I must have been about 18 months old.

It sums him up perfectly: all 6ft of him in a suit and clearly straight from rehearsals, but hunkered down on the floor, surrounded by toys and laughing about something.

My parents were working together at the time, on a production of Feydeau’s Le Dindon starring Griff Rhys Jones and Felicity Kendal, designed by Gerald Scarfe. I am clutching my prize toy cow, Lily. Pa endured a great many trials for mine and Lily’s sake: once when we were on holiday in Rome she was snatched by a stray dog, and I will never forget him charging off across the piazza in hot pursuit.

This was long before our conversation about being a director; if you’d asked me at the time what he did, I would have told you he was a taxi driver, because I waved him off to work in a black cab every morning. When he returned home from rehearsals I would present him with elaborate dinners I’d created out of Play-doh, which he would very accommodatingly pretend to eat. Our house was always full of people, and long before I could ascribe significance to who they were or what they did, I knew that everyone in his orbit loved him very much.

But even without understanding what he did, I exhibited the theatre bug from an early age. He was a captive but very attentive audience for my one-woman productions of The Lion King that I would stage, repeatedly, in our living room. He was tremendously encouraging about everything I took an interest in; and, just like he did with his actors in the rehearsal room, he made me feel that anything was possible.

It has been very important to see the tributes to him pick up on what a good man he was, as well as a great one. And it’s strange and wonderful how a picture can sum up my childhood so completely: that closeness, and that sense of laughter.

I would present him with elaborate dinners made out of Play-doh, which he would pretend to eat

Above: Peter Hall with his wife Nicki Frei and daughter Emma