FIRST OFF . . .

British director Sir Peter Hall said Wednesday he plans to direct a new commercial theater company after his contract at the National Theatre expires next year. Hall, 56, has been a prominent critic of the Conservative government’s funding of the National and the other state-subsidized theater, the Royal Shakespeare Company. The new London-based company, to be known as the Peter Hall Production Company, will begin operating at the end of 1988 under the management of Jerome Minskoff and Duncan Weldon of Triumph Theater Productions. “It is not a mini-(Royal Shakespeare Company) or rival National Theatre,” Hall told a London news conference. He said the company would stage plays in London and New York, taking them on international tour as well.