Madam plays the Linbury Theatre for two nights, 3 and 4 November 2026, marking the woman who set the standard for British ballet.
Ninette de Valois was born in County Wicklow in 1898, danced with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and then decided that Britain, which had no ballet company of its own, should have one. She founded what became the Vic-Wells Ballet in 1931, built it a school, ran it for decades and choreographed for it, and by the time she stopped it was the Royal Ballet. She also founded the Turkish state ballet on the same principle. She died in 2001, at 102. Everyone in the company called her Madam, and nobody had to explain who was meant.
Almost every dancer on the Covent Garden stage is there because of decisions she made about training, repertoire and where a national company should live. She was also a choreographer of consequence in her own right, and Job, her 1931 masque, is still revived, though the founding is what she is remembered for.
The Royal Ballet gives Madam in the Linbury Theatre on Tuesday 3 and Wednesday 4 November 2026, a portrait of the woman who set the standard the house still measures itself by. Two performances is the entire run, in a room of four hundred, which is a strikingly small frame for the subject — and arguably the right one, since the Linbury is the studio theatre her own school model produced. The Linbury opened in 1999 and was rebuilt in 2018.