Has the godfather of postwar British theatre been prescribed some kind of elixir? Peter Hall is within hailing distance of his ninth decade and already this year has sent Uncle Vanya out on tour and brought The Vortex to Shaftesbury Avenue. This month, his Theatre Royal Bath production of Pygmalion moves to the Old Vic, while this summer’s Bath season finds him staging A Doll’s House and The Portrait of a Lady.

No director has such an unbridled appetite for excavating new talent. Those instincts have been most recently vindicated in the unanimously glowing reviews for Michelle Dockery’s Eliza Doolittle in the new Pygmalion.

Michelle who? At 25, Dockery had no leading roles behind her when, with Essex audible in her voice, she auditioned for Shaw’s vowel-mangling flower girl. Her performance has just earned her second prize in the Sunday Times/ National Theatre Ian Charleson Awards, for actors under 30 in classical roles. These have often confirmed Hall’s nose for untested ability. Toby Stephens, discovered by Hall, won in 1994, and Dominic West, in Hall’s Seagull, triumphed three years later, followed by Hall’s daughter, Rebecca, for Mrs Warren’s Profession in 2002, and Andrea Riseborough, his lead in two plays in Bath, in 2006.

“If I have any virtue at all in this,” says Hall, “it’s that I dare to give people space to do what they can do, and they often surprise us. If you have an extraordinary young talent, don’t tell it how lucky it’s been – let it see what it can do. One of the problems about ageing as a director is that people do what you tell them. They think you’re always right, whereas often you’re wrong.”

He sort of got it wrong with Dockery. She had presented herself for audition a year before, when Hall was casting Measure for Measure. The find of that particular season was Riseborough, who was cast as Isabella in Measure and the title role in Miss Julie (see below). When Dockery came back a year later, she made a deeper impression. “She did an extensive audition for me, and I thought, ‘This is something we must take the risk on.’”

This is a familiar refrain. No sooner, it seems, has Hall found an actor and declared him or her “extraordinary” than a career is breathed into existence. He remembers David Warner “rambling onto the Aldwych stage and doing a bit of Shake-speare, and I knew we had to take the risk”. Warner was thrust from minor roles in the RSC to playing Shake-spearian kings in 1963. He is currently a hot ticket in the company’s Histories, as Falstaff.

Subsidised theatre enabled Hall at the RSC to take a punt on Ian Holm, Glenda Jackson, Vanessa Redgrave and Janet Suzman. At the National, he was the first to invite Michael Gambon to shoulder a main part, in Betrayal. The 1990s found him at the head of his own company at the Old Vic and moonlighting as a television director, most productively in Mary Wesley’s The Camomile Lawn. A crop of young actors made their screen debuts there: not only Stephens and Tara Fitz-gerald, but also an actress he vaguely recognised.

“I always write on my audition notes something that will help me remember them afterwards,” he recalls. “This extraordinary girl came in and read, and was remarkable. And I wrote on my sheet of paper ‘voice like Rosemary Harris’. And, of course, it was her daughter, Jennifer Ehle, whom I didn’t know.” Ehle went on to star in Pride and Prejudice. The Camomile Lawn was also the drama in which Rebecca Hall made her first appearance.

The Peter Hall Company was made homeless in 1997 by the sale of the Old Vic, since when the lion’s share of Hall’s work in London has been filled to the gills with stars: Judi Dench in The Royal Family and Hay Fever, Kim Cattrall in Whose Line is it Any-way?. Yet since 2001, when his relationship with the Theatre Royal Bath began, Hall has had the luxury of being able to cast without half a wary eye on the bottom line. “I’ve been a director for 55 years. I used to be asked what plays I would like to do. Now I’m asked who I can get. If you can get a television or Hollywood star, West End producers tend to be that much happier. If you say, ‘I’ve found this wonderful girl who can be Eliza,’ they say, ‘Don’t be silly.’ It wasn’t a case of Bath saying, ‘Who is Michelle Dockery?’ Bath just let me do it.”

The more of a Methuselah he becomes, the more overpowering his presence might seem to his protégés. Did the latest beneficiary of his patronage see him as a Henry Higgins, seeking to mould her into his own creation? “It was initially intimidating starting rehearsals,” says Dockery. “People just turn up and listen, even if they’re not called to watch him work. At the beginning, I hung on his every word. Looking back, I can’t believe how distant I felt from him. He’s very nurturing. I’m a different person now, as well as a more experienced actress, thanks to him. And I’m sure he must get some pleasure out of that.”

Pygmalion previews at the Old Vic, SE1, from May 7

Sir Peter’s hall of fame

ANDREA RISEBOROUGH, 26 “She’s got such courage. She makes things her own in a unique kind of way – almost unrecognisable from one part to another. That’s very special. You don’t meet it every day.” Riseborough served notice of her proteanism in the ensemble of the National Theatre’s 2006 contemporary “youth” trilogy, Burn/Chatroom/Citizenship. She was given her first Shakespearian lead by Hall in Measure for Measure and has since shone in a scabrous American comedy, The Pain and the Itch, at the Royal Court. On television, she excelled as a scheming young researcher in the politico series Party Animals and can next be seen as the young Margaret Thatcher in The Long Walk to Finchley, as well as in Channel 4’s civil-war epic The Devil’s Whore.

DAN STEVENS, 25 “I saw Dan [below right] first at Cambridge, doing Macbeth for the Marlowe Society. The Lady M was one Rebecca Hall, strangely enough. I thought he was an extraordinarily eloquent, well-equipped young actor who simply could develop into something special.” For Hall, he has played Orlando in As You Like It and Claudio in Much Ado, and in the West End has been in Hay Fever and is now in The Vortex. On television, he has starred in The Line of Beauty and as Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility.

EMILY BLUNT, 25 “I auditioned her when she was 17 for The Royal Family, at the Haymarket. She had a kind of fresh wit. A really amusing personality. She’s made for film.” Film is where Blunt has almost entirely made her mark. After playing Catherine Howard in the TV drama Henry VIII, she shared an Evening Standard British Film Award for most promising newcomer with Nathalie Press, her co-star in 2004’s My Summer of Love. Despite the presence of Meryl Streep, she had an eye-catching turn as an anorexic fashion flunkey in The Devil Wears Prada. Next, she plays the lead in The Young Victoria. She also won a Golden Globe for Stephen Poliakoff’s Gideon’s Daughter.

REBECCA HALL, 25 “We saw about 500 little girls for young Sophy in The Camomile Lawn and couldn’t find one who had her feet on the ground. I was in despair. The week before we started shooting, the casting director said, ‘Can we test your daughter Rebecca?’ I said, ‘If you want to test her, you test her, but count me out.’ ” Hall fille [left] has worked for her father in Mrs Warren’s Profession, As You Like It, Man and Superman and Galileo’s Daughter.

“I suppose you can say she was jolly lucky to have a father to cast her in a leading Shaw part. I would also point out that had she not brought it off brilliantly, we’d have never heard from her again.” On television, she played the lead in Wide Sargasso Sea, while her films include Starter for 10, The Prestige and the co-lead in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Next, she’s in Sam Mendes’s Bridge Project. “That gives me pride,” says her dad. “Now is the moment for her to go far away from father.”

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