More About the Donmar Warehouse

Earlham Street was laid out in the 1690s as part of Thomas Neale's Seven Dials development. By the 1870s this end of it held the vats and the hop store of Combe and Co's Woodyard Brewery. In the 1920s it was a silent film studio, and after that it was where Covent Garden market ripened its bananas. The brick and the metal-framed windows are still nineteenth-century warehouse.

Donald Albery, who had formed the Donmar company back in 1953, bought the site in 1961 and had it adapted as a private drama studio and rehearsal space for Margot Fonteyn's London Festival Ballet. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones both rehearsed in it during the 1960s.

It became a theatre in 1977, when the Royal Shakespeare Company took it on, renamed it the Warehouse and converted it at speed. It opened on 18 July 1977 with a transfer of Schweyk in the Second World War, directed by Howard Davies. After the RSC moved to the Barbican it was refurbished again, and it reopened in 1992 with the UK premiere of Sondheim's Assassins. It has produced its own work ever since.

The most recent change was a substantial refurbishment in 2021, aimed largely at access and at the building's environmental performance.

Who runs it

The Donmar is an independent charity. It is not owned or run by any of the theatre groups, it takes no public funding, and it raises more than £4 million a year to keep going. It is registered charity number 284262 and its offices and rehearsal rooms are round the corner on Dryden Street, a building it bought in 2011.

Tim Sheader has been Artistic Director since March 2024, running the theatre jointly with Executive Director Henny Finch. Before him: Michael Longhurst from March 2019 to 2024, Josie Rourke from 2012 to 2019 alongside Executive Producer Kate Pakenham, Michael Grandage from 2002, and Sam Mendes, who was appointed in 1990 and reopened the theatre in 1992.

Past productions

Productions that have played here:

  • Macbeth
  • Next to Normal
  • The Band's Visit
  • Coriolanus
  • Julius Caesar
  • Private Lives
  • The Maids
  • Mass
  • The Guilty

Shows made here have a habit of moving on to bigger theatres in the West End and on Broadway.

Other theatres nearby

  • Cambridge Theatre, on the same street, at the Seven Dials end. Three levels and a musical in residence
  • Ambassadors Theatre, West Street, about three minutes. Also two levels, Stalls and Circle
  • St Martin's Theatre, next door to it on West Street. Three levels, and home of The Mousetrap