Encounters - Director Peter Hall discusses gorgeous women and theatre with Michael Coveney

I was inspecting the plaque by the entrance to the new theatre in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey - Britain's first purpose-built theatre of the 21st century - when Sir Peter Hall, its founding director, ambled into view in his trademark deerstalker and black-and-white-checked overcoat.

It was dark, it was cold, it was two hours before curtain-up. Would I join him for a drink? For a moment or two, I thought about playing hard to get, but instead I caved in and we wandered off to the quayside development on the Thames that has sprung up as a result of this extraordinary project - a thousand-seater auditorium inspired by Shakespeare's Rose Theatre, which was uncovered in an archaeological excavation by Blackfriars Bridge in 1989.

Over dinner in the cosy new riverside Carluccio's, Hall talked eloquently about Shakespeare, critics, his artistic legacy and Kim Cattrall - whom he is directing in Whose Life is it Anyway? in the West End later this month. "I've known her for 30 years. Nobody remembers this, but she had a small part in Michael Frayn's version of Chekhov's Wild Honey, which we did with Ian McKellen when I was at the National. She's a gorgeous lady and I've been wanting to work with her for a long time. Too bad she spends the whole play covered up to her neck as she's lying in bed waiting to die!"

Hall throws back his head like a great big seal and laughs broadly. When I remind him that a drama critic called Charles Landstone dropped dead in the street after reviewing Whose Life . . . ? he is more alarmed than amused, and tries hard to salvage Landstone's memory and career. "Nice man. Worked on the Arts Council for a time."

Ah, the Arts Council. As the architect of the Royal Shakespeare Company - he founded it in 1960 - and first director of the National Theatre on the South Bank, Hall has had his battles with the subsidy wallahs, dragging them along behind his own vision and ambition. Yet there is no sign of such financial support to complete the Rose at Kingston, whose raw interior was only temporarily made fit for a series of performances. While an impressive £5m has already been raised, a further £6m is needed - but Hall is in no doubt that it will be achieved.

George Bernard Shaw said that the British people never know what they want until they are given it. This was as true of the National Gallery as it was of the National Theatre. The great thing - potentially - about the Rose is its proximity to Kingston University and its immediate and practical link with the students.

The new theatre's stage is nothing like the Globe further down the river. "We now know that the Elizabethan Rose was not a thrust stage with the audience clustered around, but a lozenge shape, wide and narrow, tapering towards the front." No one at the Rose of Kingston - the no-nonsense name was decided on by Hall's old friend Harold Pinter - is seated behind the actors. Rather, the acting area seems like a logical extension of the circular auditorium.

Does that mean the RSC is wrong in its plans to push the Swan Theatre's stage even further into the audience? "I'm very worried about it," admits Hall. "I like the Swan at Stratford very much, but once the actor has come on the stage, it is not so easy to get off, as the auditorium is so narrow. There are disadvantages to the thrust that the Rose does not have."

Hall is now 74 and, although he moves slowly, he is not slowing down professionally. "I love working and I hate not working." He is fully committed to the Rose, running a company of 20 actors and working with the students once the theatre is fully operational in the autumn. Beyond that, he is planning Tristan and Isolde in 2009. And Noel Coward's Hay Fever with Judi Dench quite soon.

As usual, Hall received his favourite meal - oysters and chips - from Dench on his birthday. She sends it to him every year, wherever he is. "She is utterly amazing and I adore her, always have done." Nobody is controversial about Dench. Alan Bennett once topped Richard Eyre's suggestion for worst-taste heavy-metal-style T-shirt - "Hitler: the European tour" - with one bearing the slogan "I hate Judi Dench".

"There you are," says Hall. "When she first appeared at the Old Vic in 1957, we all thought she'd be a very good, funny, sexy soubrette. But she's now not only the leader of any company she's in, she's the leader of her profession. She's Ellen Terry, Sybil Thorndike and Peggy Ashcroft rolled into one."

By now we are heading back to the theatre for the opening of As You Like It, with Hall's daughter Rebecca playing Rosalind. Rebecca's mother, Hall's third wife, the opera singer Maria Ewing, will join him for the performance. As we leave Carluccio's, he greets his mother-in-law - "by far the nicest mother-in-law I've had".

Hall, a serial monogamist, was first married to Leslie Caron, then his secretary Jackie Taylor, then Ewing and now Nicki Frei, who used to work in the National Theatre's publicity office. Not that she needed to teach Hall any tricks on that score. Having charmed the pants off me for 70 minutes, he greets a bunch of theatre critics like old friends and, sipping the celebratory champagne in a plastic beaker, continues telling them about "the most exciting new theatre I've ever worked in . . . the theatre I've dreamed about all my life".

For more about the Rose at Kingston, visit www.kingstontheatre.org

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