His Majesty's Theatre

Stand on the Haymarket pavement for a moment and listen. Buses grind uphill toward Piccadilly. Taxis idle at the kerb. Above the traffic, a pale stone facade rises in tiers of columns and carved ornament, topped by a green copper dome. This is His Majesty's Theatre. If you have come in the evening, the canopy lights are already glowing. People are gathering under them with tickets in hand, the same way audiences have gathered on this exact patch of London for more than three hundred years.

That long history is the first surprise. The building in front of you is not the first theatre here. It is the fourth. The first opened in 1705, designed by John Vanbrugh. Vanbrugh was an unusual figure: a playwright who also became one of England's great Baroque architects. He called his house the Queen's Theatre, in honour of Queen Anne. The name of the building has changed with the gender of the monarch ever since. Queen's, then King's, then Her Majesty's, and now His Majesty's again.

The street name tells you what this area once was. The Haymarket was a working market where hay and straw were sold for London's horses. A theatre among the carts and fodder sounds strange today. But the West End was still growing then, and land on the edge of town was available. Within a few decades, this patch of ground was linked to one sound more than any other — Italian opera.

Under the Hanoverian kings, the theatre became London's home for opera. George Frideric Handel, the German-born composer who settled in England, presented his Italian operas here. His opera Rinaldo had its first performance on this site in 1711, and it caused a sensation. Imagine the candlelit auditorium, the elaborate stage machinery, the star singers from Italy. For a London audience, it was spectacle on a scale they had rarely seen. Handel's long relationship with this site helped shape English musical taste.

Theatres of that era burned often. Candles, oil lamps, wooden stages and painted canvas were a dangerous mixture. Vanbrugh's building was destroyed by fire in 1789. A larger opera house replaced it. When Victoria came to the throne in 1837, the house became Her Majesty's. Then, in 1867, fire struck again. Each new building carried the old name forward, as if the site itself kept its identity while the walls came and went.

The theatre you see today opened in 1897. It was designed by Charles J. Phipps, one of the busiest theatre architects of the Victorian age. His client was the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Tree was the kind of figure the period loved: a star performer who also ran his own company and his own building. He wanted a grand home for lavish productions of Shakespeare and new drama. Look up at the facade and you can see that ambition in stone.

Phipps chose a French Renaissance style, borrowed from the great chateaux and public buildings of France. Notice the paired columns, the arched windows, the balustrade along the roofline, and above all the dome. That dome was not only decoration. Tree used the space beneath it for his private apartments and rooms. In a city of plain brick terraces, this building was designed to look like a palace for the theatre.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. In 1904, Tree founded a school for actors in the rooms of this theatre. It began in the dome. That school grew into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, known today as RADA. It later moved to its own home in Bloomsbury. Generations of British actors trained there, and the story of that famous school begins in the building behind you.

During the First World War, this stage hosted one of the great hits of its age. A musical called Chu Chin Chow opened here in 1916. It was an exotic, colourful tale based on the story of Ali Baba. Soldiers on leave came to see it again and again, and it ran for more than two thousand performances. For decades it held the record as one of the longest-running musicals in London. A record like that seemed impossible to beat.

Then came October 1986. Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera opened here, and it has stayed ever since. It became one of the longest-running shows in the history of the West End. There is a quiet poetry in this. A musical about a haunted Paris opera house now lives on a site that was once London's opera house. The falling chandelier and the masked figure in the shadows feel at home here.

The theatre took its current name in 2023, after King Charles the Third came to the throne. The change was simple: Her Majesty's became His Majesty's once more. Few buildings in London carry such a direct link to the crown in their name. The theatre is also protected as a listed building, which means its historic fabric cannot be altered without careful approval. What you see is very close to what Tree's first audiences saw.

Before you leave, walk around to the back of the building. There you will find the Royal Opera Arcade, a narrow covered passage of small shopfronts with curved bay windows. It was built in the early nineteenth century by John Nash and George Repton, and it ran alongside the opera house of that time. It is often described as London's oldest surviving shopping arcade. The opera house it served is gone, but the arcade still stands.

So take one more look at the dome against the sky, the carved stone, and the glowing canopy. Theatres have come and gone on this ground, yet the crowds keep arriving at the same doors. As you walk back into the noise of the Haymarket, listen for music drifting out when the doors open. It is the same street and the same purpose... only a new evening.