The Royal Ballet
Like Water for Chocolate | Main Stage
1-24 October 2025
Audio Described performance and Touch Tours on 4 and 24 October 2025
Passion, mystery and magic form the ingredients of Royal Ballet’s Artistic Associate Christopher Wheeldon’s captivating family saga inspired by Laura Esquivel’s modern Mexican classic. Returning for its first revival, this delectable ballet transports us into Tita’s world with music and designs by Wheeldon’s longstanding collaborators with music by Joby Talbot and designs by Bob Crowley.
La Fille mal gardée | Main Stage
18 October – 13 November 2025
Live Audio Described Performance and Touch Tour on 18 October and 5 November 2025
Captioned performance on 11 November 2025.
65 years after its premiere, The Royal Ballet presents Frederick Ashton’s La Fille mal gardée. This affectionate portrayal of village life combines exuberant good humour and brilliantly inventive choreography in what is undoubtedly Ashton’s love letter to the English countryside. La Fille mal gardée whisks us away into pastoral bliss with Ferdinand Hérold’s cheerful score and Osbert Lancaster’s colourful designs.
New production: Perspectives: Balanchine, Marston and Peck | Main Stage
14 November – 2 December 2025
Serenade was one of the first ballets created by George Balanchine, a defining figure of 20th-century ballet. A radiant work of pure beauty, the ethereal ballet is set to Tchaikovsky’s soaring Serenade for Strings. Following her award-winning success with The Cellist, Cathy Marston’s new work takes as its inspiration Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto, a turbulent yet intimate piece written as Europe teetered on the brink of World War II. Justin Peck’s uplifting Everywhere We Go concludes the mixed programme. Its cinematic score by musician Sufjan Stevens was commissioned exclusively for this ballet. Everywhere We Go is the first of the American choreographer’s works to be performed by The Royal Ballet.
Communion of Light, Joburg Ballet | Linbury Theatre
30 October – 2 November 2025
Johannesburg company Joburg Ballet make their Linbury Theatre debut with a mixed programme celebrating South Africa’s 30th year of democracy. Opening the mixed programme is Dada Masilo’s Salomé, in which the late South African choreographer adapts Oscar Wilde’s play of desire, power and unbridled passion. Alongside it is Jorge Pérez Martínez’s Azul – a spirited work about water and its role in community – and Hannah Ma’s The Void, which dives into the vastness of the human soul and the beauty of human existence. The programme is completed by artistic director Dane Hurst’s Resonance. This new ballet, set to South African jazz music, celebrates the enduring power of community, music and dance to unite, heal and inspire freedom of expression.
Rebirth: Robbins, Page, Ratmansky, Chu, London City Ballet | Linbury Theatre
19 – 22 November 2025
Under the artistic direction of Christopher Marney, London City Ballet (former resident company at Sadler’s Wells Theatre) was reformed in 2023. The revived company makes their Linbury Theatre debut this Season. The mixed programme features the UK premiere of Jerome Robbins’ Quiet City, which he created in 1986 to Aaron Copland’s score of the same name, depicting a bygone era of New York City. The company also performs Ashley Page’s exuberant Larina Waltz, first created for an all-star cast at the Royal Opera House in 1993, and Alexei Ratmansky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, in which dancers bring art to life against a backdrop of Kandinsky masterpieces. The programme will also include a new commission by rising British choreographer Tash Chu.
The Royal Opera
New production: Tosca | Main Stage
11 September – 7 October 2025
In cinemas: Wednesday 1 October 2025
All dates will be audio described, BSL performance 7 October
Opening the Season, Music Director Jakub Hrůša conducts his first production in his new role: a new production of one of the most popular operas in the repertoire, Puccini’s Tosca. Director of Opera Oliver Mears sets the fast-paced action in modern-day Rome in the devastation of war, heightening Puccini’s thrilling music. The score includes soaring arias such as Tosca’s ‘Vissi d’arte’ (‘I lived for my art’) and Cavardossi’s ‘Recondita armonia’ (‘Hidden harmony’).
The star-studded cast includes Anna Netrebko and Aleksandra Kurzak in the title role, Freddie De Tommaso as Cavaradossi, and Gerald Finley as Baron Scarpia. De Tommaso has a long history with the role of Cavaradossi when in 2021, he stepped in part way through the performance when the original tenor became unwell during the first act. At 28, it made him the youngest ever tenor to perform the role on the Covent Garden Stage.
The Sicilian Vespers | Main Stage
19 September – 6 October 2025
Speranza Scappucci makes her debut as Principal Guest Conductor of The Royal Opera, bringing Verdi’s grand opera to electrifying life. Based on a real historical event that took place on 30 March 1282 in Sicily, SeokJong Baek performs the role of Henri, a man torn between his Sicilian roots and his loyalty to Montfort the French governor – whom he learns is his father. Falling in love with Hélène (Marina Rebeka), a Sicilian noblewoman who is seeking revenge for her brother’s execution, political tensions begin to rise ending in a climactic confrontation.
New Production: Giustino | Linbury Theatre
7 – 18 October 2025
BSL performance, 14 & 15 October
Audio described, 15 October
Continuing the Royal Opera’s series of Handel’s Covent Garden works, Joe Hill-Gibbins makes his Royal Opera directorial debut with Giustino. A fantastical opera, the production marks the first staging on the original site, and the first UK professional staging, since the opera’s premiere in 1737. Polly Leech and Keri Fuge perform the roles of Giustino and Anastasio respectively under the baton of David Bates who conducts specialist Baroque ensemble La Nuova Musica.
New Production: The Makropulos Case | Main Stage
4 – 21 November 2025
Acclaimed director Katie Mitchell stages Covent Garden’s first ever production of Janáček’s The Makropulos Case. Soprano Ausrine Stundyte performs the role Emila Marty and leads a stellar cast that also includes Sean Panikkar (Albert Gregor), Johan Reuter (Baron Jaroslave Prus) and Henry Waddington (Dr Kolenatý). With Music Director Jakub Hrůša conducting, it is another opportunity to see him conduct music from his Czech heritage; earlier in the year he conducted Jenůfa to critical acclaim and wide-spread 5-star reviews.
Last Days | Linbury Theatre
5 December 2025 – 3 January 2026
Audio Description on 15 & 20 December
BSL performances on 11 & 20 December
Relaxed performance on 20 December
Following its sold-out run in the Linbury Theatre in 2021, composer Olivier Leith and librettist and co-director Matt Copson’s visceral opera returns to The Royal Opera.
Adapted from Gus Van Sant’s 2005 film loosely based on the final days of grunge icon Kurt Cobain, critically acclaimed Last Days is an introspective meditation on the silent torment and alienation that created a modern myth. Composer Olivier Leith and librettist and co-director Matt Copson’s visceral opera – which stars Agathe Rousselle as Blake and features an original aria recorded by sing-songwriter Caroline Polachek – captures the slow unravelling of a man haunted by outside noise and inside turmoil.
New Production: Ariodante | Main Stage
9 – 21 December 2025
Emily D’Angelo and former Jette Parker Artist Jacquelyn Stucker star as Ariodante and Ginevra in this new production by Jetske Mijnssen, who makes her House debut. Part of our Handel in Covent Garden series, Ariodante was his first opera for the theatre and one of three of his operas inspired by Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando furioso. Musical highlights, conducted by Stefano Montanari, include Ariodante’s aria when he finds out his beloved Ginevra has betrayed him, ‘Scherza, infida, in grembo al drudo’ (‘Enjoy yourself, faithless one, in the arms of your lover’).
