David Pugh is a West End producer, but he doesn't chomp cigars or wear a suit and he's hopeless at sacking people. In fact he's a camp, bonkers extrovert who chain-smokes while he chain-talks. As a passionate showman he is that rare bird, an independent producer in an increasingly corporate market place.

Pugh and his younger, calmer business partner, Dafydd Rogers, have been together more than 11 years. It's Rogers's job to kick his garrulous friend under the table when he's being indiscreet (which is often). Rogers, 38, has a theology degree, has worked as a theatre usher, and was once in theatre management at the Royal Court. He has a wife and two small children. Pugh, 48, on the other hand is a bloke from Stoke (his mum supports Stoke City; his dad Port Vale) who trained as a teacher, but for years now has been married to the business called show.

They have between them produced some of the most unpredictable and exciting theatre of recent years. The Play What I Wrote, staged by the Right Size, about Morecambe and Wise, was a great triumph. Ducktastic! - a play starring 45 live birds - was, however, a disaster. “We've been eating duck à l'orange ever since,” Rogers quips. Their recent tour of Rebecca with Nigel Havers (crumpet of choice for the lady theatre- goer) took a staggering £5.5 million in 33 weeks.

As Pugh puts it, “the Du Maurier estate got so excited they delivered us every sodding book she's ever written. I didn't know she wrote The Birds. I read and loved the story so I sent it to Conor MacPherson and that's what he's doing for us. I didn't tell him Dave the Duckman - he does the birds for the Harry Potter films - also supplied me 100 pigeons. I offered Conor the lot. He said, ‘The story is much more scary without your pigeons. And anyway by the time I've written it, they'll all be dead.'”

Their last show was Peter Shaffer's Equus, in which they persuaded that nice Harry Potter (aka Daniel Radcliffe) to strip naked, have sex and mutilate horses. Warner Bros were very upset. The hugely expensive show recouped in just 11 weeks. Radcliffe, strangely enough, spent the first months of his life in a Moses basket in Pugh's office where his mother worked as an assistant.

But it was Art (by Yasmina Reza) which proved the dream show. It ran for eight and a half years in the West End, a golden egg that they kept going with umpteen 12-weekly cast changes seemingly recruited, in its latter years, from the back pages of Hello! Pugh claims the play made the Parisian author and her translator Christopher Hampton more than £7 million each. Now they are presenting the new play from Reza - called The God of Carnage - about two families who go head-to-head over a playground fight - and they are throwing the creative team behind Art at it. It opens at the Gielgud Theatre in March.

“She's an interesting person Yasmina and I like her,” says Pugh. “OK, she might have had a couple of duffers since Art and OK, she's a snob: she'd probably be far rather be doing this for someone with O levels like Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre. This new one is terrific: nasty and very funny at the same time. It's a four-hander and we needed four f***-off actors for it.” The heavyweight cast they have assembled is: Ralph Fiennes, Ken Stott, Tamsin Greig and Janet McTeer. “They are all getting paid the same. £7,500 each [a week] plus a percentage.”

The show they now have under way is a return to the unconventional side of their business which makes these two producers so unusual. It's a version by the Kneehigh Theatre Company, directed by Emma Rice, of Brief Encounter. The last time Noël Coward's love story was staged in the West End I prayed vainly that its two stars would be crushed by an incoming train. This new version sounds different. It includes material from Coward's songs, poems, 12 minutes of the famous film, and is based substantially on Still Life, the pre-war play from which Coward developed his 1945 screenplay.

Pugh was determined to take me over to the Piccadilly venue where it is being staged. The picturehouse where Brief Encounter received its premiere in 1946 is no more. But just down the road is Cineworld Haymarket which once upon a time was the Carlton Theatre, built in 1926. Within this three-screen cinema is the theatre's old dress circle - a riot in mauve and a plush alternative to the deep vein thrombosis offered by West End theatre stalls.

“I wanted to work with Emma Rice who is in my opinion one of the top five directors in the country. But you have to stand back, give them money and let them run with it,” says Pugh. “We told our investors [they have 82 of them], ‘Listen, this is a flyer, there's nobody in it, it's a damn good title and Kneehigh we believe in.' Eight weeks later we had a show that was making people cry [it has been seen in Leeds and Birmingham]. But it was missing something off the bill. We didn't know what to do about it. So we rang up Peter Thompson [their seen-it-all press representative] who said ‘You're buggered.'”

Thompson, however, reminded them that The Rocky Horror Show had successfully transferred to the Classic Cinema in Chelsea. An idea was born. Pugh and Rice found the venue. They took a lease out and immediately started selling tickets with that old rock'n'roll caveat “subject to licence”.

“From the minute you walk down the Haymarket we want you to go to the cinema as if in 1946. It's about the whole thing. The show starts in the foyer,” says Rogers. Cineworld staff have been roped in and they'll be in period costume, tearing tickets with a smile and shining torches down the aisles. There will be matinees at weekends, including Sundays. They've even got a tea trolley and, with luck, a period organ, though the instrument they wanted to borrow from the Blackpool legend Reg Dixon proved too big to install. “Everyone is thinking we are either bonkers or ‘Let's get in on it, it might be a success,'” says a beaming Pugh. “This is fun. This is how we get our kicks. And, God, I hope it works.”

Kneehigh Theatre presents Noel Coward's Brief Encounter, “The Cinema on the Haymarket”, London SW1 (www.seebriefencounter.com 0871 2301562), until March 2

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