About the Aldwych Theatre

Opened 23 December 1905. Grade II listed. Around 1,200 seats. Run by the Nederlander Organisation since 1982.

W. G. R. Sprague designed it, and at the same time designed today's Novello, at the other end of the same block with the Waldorf Hilton between them. They were built as a pair, which is why they look so alike from the street.

A remarkable record for its size

  • 1913: Diaghilev and Nijinsky held the first rehearsals of The Rite of Spring here, months before the premiere that started a riot in Paris.
  • 1923 to 1933: the Aldwych farces, twelve of them, most written by Ben Travers and staged by the actor-manager Tom Walls. They ran nearly continuously for a decade and the genre is named after this building.
  • 1949: the first London A Streetcar Named Desire. Laurence Olivier directed and Vivien Leigh played Blanche DuBois, opening on 11 October. It was a scandal at the time. Tennessee Williams's play ran straight at the British censorship rules of the day, and the production was attacked for it before anyone had seen it. Leigh won an Oscar for the film version two years later, and was always open about the cost of playing the part.
  • 1960 to 1981: the Royal Shakespeare Company's London home, for twenty-one years under Peter Hall. London saw the Stratford work here, and the company went as far as rebuilding this stage to the same apron shape as its own so nothing had to be re-staged on arrival. Peter Brook's Marat/Sade landed here in 1964 and is still cited as the production that changed what British audiences expected a play to do to them. The two-part Nicholas Nickleby followed in 1980, eight and a half hours long, and sold out three separate seasons. The company moved on to the Barbican in 1982.

Previous shows at the Aldwych

Fame ran from 2002 to 2006, Dirty Dancing from 2006 to 2011, and Tina: The Tina Turner Musical arrived in 2018 and stayed for years.

That is the modern pattern here: not a receiving house taking whatever is going, but a theatre that finds one show and keeps it.

Now at the Aldwych: Sinatra The Musical, booking to 10 April 2027.

It is a right-sized theatre for a musical: big enough to do one justice, small enough that the back of the house still feels part of it.

Other theatres of a similar size

  • The Novello Theatre, its twin, 1,085 seats, at the other end of the same block and built at the same time by the same architect.
  • The Savoy Theatre, 1,129 seats, a few minutes along the Strand.