Royal Opera House

The foundation of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden lies in letters patent awarded by Charles II to Sir William Davenant in 1662, allowing Davenant to operate one of only two patent theatre companies in London, the Duke's Company. The patent stayed in the possession of the patentees' heirs until the 19th century; its whereabouts were then unknown for some time, and as of 2019 it was held in the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia. In 1728 John Rich, actor-manager of the Duke's Company at Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, commissioned The Beggar's Opera from John Gay, and the success of that venture provided him with the capital to build the Theatre Royal, designed by Edward Shepherd, on the site of an ancient convent garden. Inigo Jones had developed part of the property in the 1630s with a piazza and St Paul's church, and a royal charter had created a fruit and vegetable market in the area which survived on the spot until 1974. At the opening on 7 December 1732, Rich was carried into the building in procession by his actors for an inaugural production of William Congreve's The Way of the World.

For its first century the theatre was operated primarily as a playhouse. The letters patent granted by Charles II gave the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden and the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane exclusive rights to present spoken drama in London, and competition between the two was intense, with the same plays often running at both houses at once. Rich brought pantomime into the repertoire and performed in it himself, under the stage name John Lun, as Harlequin; a tradition of seasonal pantomime continued at the theatre until 1939. The first ballet, Pygmalion, was presented in 1734, with Marie Salle discarding tradition and her corset to dance in diaphanous robes.

George Frideric Handel had been named musical director of the company at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1719, but his first season of opera for the theatre was not presented until 1734, opening with Il pastor fido; the premieres of Alcina and Atalanta followed. A royal performance of Messiah in 1743 succeeded well enough to establish a tradition of Lenten oratorio performances. From 1735 until his death in 1759 Handel gave regular seasons at the theatre, and many of his operas and oratorios were written for the venue or had their first London performances there. He bequeathed his organ to John Rich, and it was placed in a prominent position on the stage. In 1792 the architect Henry Holland rebuilt the auditorium, expanding its capacity within the existing shell of the building. The organ was among many valuable items lost in the fire that destroyed the theatre on 20 September 1808.

Rebuilding began in December 1808, and the second Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, designed by Robert Smirke, opened on 18 September 1809 with a performance of Macbeth followed by a musical entertainment called The Quaker. The actor-manager John Philip Kemble raised seat prices to help recoup the cost of the rebuilding and the cost of an increased ground rent introduced by the landowner, John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford. The move was so unpopular that audiences disrupted performances by beating sticks, hissing, booing and dancing. The Old Price Riots lasted over two months, and the management was finally forced to accede to the audience's demands.

Entertainment in the new house was varied; opera and ballet were presented, but not exclusively. Kemble engaged a range of acts, including the child performer Master Betty, and the tragediennes Sarah Siddons and Eliza O'Neill and the Shakespearean actors William Macready, Edmund Kean and his son Charles all appeared at the theatre. On 25 March 1833 Edmund Kean collapsed on stage while playing Othello, and died two months later. The clown Joseph Grimaldi made his name at Covent Garden, where he had performed his greatest success, Harlequin and Mother Goose; or the Golden Egg, in 1806, subsequently revived at the new theatre. By 1821 dance and clowning had taken such a physical toll on Grimaldi that he could barely walk, and he retired; by 1828 he was penniless, and Drury Lane held a benefit concert for him after Covent Garden refused.

In 1817 bare flame gaslight replaced the candles and oil lamps that had lighted the Covent Garden stage, and in 1837 Macready employed limelight in the theatre for the first time, during a performance of a pantomime, Peeping Tom of Coventry, allowing spotlights to highlight performers on the stage. The Theatres Act 1843 broke the patent theatres' monopoly of drama. Her Majesty's Theatre in the Haymarket was at that time the main centre of ballet and opera, but after a dispute with the management in 1846 Michael Costa, conductor at Her Majesty's, transferred his allegiance to Covent Garden, bringing most of the company with him. In 1852 Louis Antoine Jullien presented an opera of his own composition, Pietro il Grande, with live horses on the stage and very loud music; critics considered the five performances a complete failure, and Jullien was ruined and fled to America. The conjuror John Henry Anderson, who had exposed the Davenport brothers, leased the theatre to stage shows critical of mediums and spiritualism, and after a gala performance and bal masque organised by Anderson the theatre caught fire in the early hours of 5 March 1856 and was destroyed.

The company performed at the Lyceum Theatre during the 1856–57 seasons. Work on a third theatre, designed by Edward Middleton Barry, started in 1857; built by Lucas Brothers, it opened on 15 May 1858 with a performance of Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots, and it remains the nucleus of the present theatre. The Royal English Opera company under the management of Louisa Pyne and William Harrison made its last performance at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane on 11 December 1858 and took up residence at Covent Garden on 20 December 1858 with the premiere of Michael Balfe's Satanella, the first opera to have its world premiere at the new theatre; the company continued there until 1865.

Barry also designed the large iron and glass Floral Hall alongside the theatre, built by the Opera House to house a flower market that also sold fruit and vegetables, and opened in 1860. It was used for a time as a concert hall before becoming part of the Covent Garden Market in 1887. Costa and his successors presented all operas in Italian, even those originally written in French, German or English, until 1892, when Gustav Mahler presented the debut of Wagner's Ring cycle at Covent Garden. The word Italian was then quietly dropped from the name of the opera house. The theatre became the Royal Opera House in 1892, and the number of French and German works offered increased. Winter and summer seasons of opera and ballet were given, and the building was also used for pantomime, recitals and political meetings. During the First World War the theatre was requisitioned by the Ministry of Works for use as a furniture repository.

From 1934 to 1936 Geoffrey Toye was managing director, working alongside the artistic director Sir Thomas Beecham; despite early successes the two eventually fell out, and Toye resigned. During the Second World War the Royal Opera House became a dance hall, and there was a possibility that it would remain one after the war. Lengthy negotiations ended with the music publishers Boosey & Hawkes acquiring the lease of the building. David Webster was appointed General Administrator, Sadler's Wells Ballet was invited to become the resident ballet company, and the Covent Garden Opera Trust was created, laying out plans to establish Covent Garden as the national centre of opera and ballet, employing British artists in all departments wherever that was consistent with the maintenance of the best possible standards.

The house presented one of the Robert Mayer Children's concerts on Saturday 9 February 1946, before the grand opening. The Royal Opera House reopened on 20 February 1946 with a performance of The Sleeping Beauty in a new production designed by Oliver Messel. Webster and his music director, Karl Rankl, immediately began to build a resident company. In December 1946 they shared their first production, Purcell's The Fairy-Queen, with the ballet company, and on 14 January 1947 the Covent Garden Opera Company gave its first performance, of Bizet's Carmen.

Several renovations had taken place to parts of the house in the 1960s, including improvements to the amphitheatre, but the theatre clearly needed a major overhaul. In 1975 the Labour government gave land adjacent to the Royal Opera House for a long-overdue modernisation, refurbishment and extension, and in the early 1980s the first part of that work added an extension to the rear of the theatre on the James Street corner, containing new ballet studios, rehearsal rooms, offices and dressing rooms. By 1995 sufficient funds had been raised, from the Arts Lottery through Arts Council England and from private fundraising, to embark on a 213 million pound reconstruction of the building by Carillion, carried out between 1997 and 1999 under the chairmanship of Sir Angus Stirling. Almost the whole site was demolished, including several adjacent buildings, to enlarge the complex; the auditorium itself remained, but well over half of the complex was new. The design team was led by Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones of Dixon Jones BDP as architects, with Arup as building engineer and Stanhope as developer. The rebuilt house kept the same horseshoe-shaped auditorium and gained a new studio theatre, the Linbury, named in recognition of donations made by the Linbury Trust.

The Floral Hall had a harder century. A fire broke out in it in 1956, after which it sat derelict; the Opera House acquired it in 1977 and used it as storage space, and before the redevelopment it held scenery. The 1990s work involved lifting up the cast iron structure to accommodate new public areas underneath, and because the southern side of the hall now connected with another building, the cast iron south portico was dismantled and rebuilt in Borough Market, where it is separately listed at Grade II. The redevelopment had gone ahead on the strength of a pledge of 10 million pounds from the philanthropist Alberto Vilar, and for a number of years the space was known as the Vilar Floral Hall; Vilar failed to make good his pledge, and in September 2005 the name was changed to the Paul Hamlyn Hall after the opera house received a donation of 10 million pounds from the estate of Paul Hamlyn towards its education and development programmes. The hall now acts as the atrium and main public area of the house. The auditorium itself is listed at Grade I, a designation it has carried since January 1970.

A scenery-making facility opened at High House, Purfleet, in Essex on 6 December 2010, and a costume-making centre followed there in September 2015, which also houses the company's collection of historically important costumes. In October 2020 the house was reported to have lost 60 per cent of its income as a result of restrictions imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic; the 1971 Portrait of Sir David Webster by David Hockney, which had hung in the house for several decades, was auctioned at Christie's and sold for 12.8 million pounds, the proceeds being needed to ensure the survival of the institution, while significant redundancies were made and a loan was sought from the Culture Recovery Fund. In 2023 members of the orchestra were selected to play at the coronation of Charles III and Camilla, and in 2024 the public branding of the venue was changed to Royal Ballet and Opera, reflecting the resident companies, while the building itself retains the title of the Royal Opera House. On 19 July 2025, after a performance of Verdi's Il Trovatore, Oliver Mears, Director of Opera, entered the stage and attempted without success to take a Palestinian flag from a member of the cast, Daniel Perry, who had brought it on to unfurl during the curtain call in protest against the Gaza war; the company declined to confirm or deny Mears's involvement and described Perry's actions as completely inappropriate. In late July 2025, 182 members of the Royal Ballet and Opera signed an open letter to the chief executive, Alex Beard, and the board, stating that they were deeply concerned about recent actions and decisions taken by the company “in the context of the ongoing genocide in Gaza”. The letter objected to the recent hiring out of the company's production of Turandot to the Israeli Opera, which had offered free tickets to uniformed members of the IDF, and called on Beard to reject any current or future performances in Israel. On 4 August Beard told staff that the new production of Tosca would not be going to Israel.