Madam, the Royal Ballet's two-performance portrait of Ninette de Valois, the woman who built it, plays the Linbury Theatre this November.
Madam, the Royal Ballet’s portrait of Ninette de Valois, plays the Linbury Theatre at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden on Tuesday 3 and Wednesday 4 November 2026.
De Valois was born in County Wicklow in 1898 and danced with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. She 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 and built it a school. She 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.
Job, her 1931 masque, is still revived. She died in 2001, at 102, and everyone in the company had called her Madam.
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. The founding is what she is remembered for.
The Linbury seats four hundred, a small frame for the subject. The studio theatre opened in 1999 and was rebuilt in 2018.