Royal Ballet and Opera: Must-see productions this autumn

The Royal Ballet and Opera has announced an ambitious Autumn 2026 season, featuring world premieres, major revivals, anniversary celebrations, and performances by some of the world’s leading dancers, singers, and conductors.

The Royal Ballet

New Production: The McRae / Vassilev Project | Linbury Theatre

11 – 19 September 2026

Over the years, Royal Ballet Principal dancer Steven McRae and Principal Guest Concert Master Vasko Vassilev have thrilled audiences with their onstage vitality, charisma and theatricality. In this new venture, the pair join forces in the Linbury Theatre to present The McRae / Vassilev Project. Directed by renowned theatre, film and opera director Natalie Abrahami (Rusalka, The Turn of the Screw) and featuring a new creation inspired by the prodigious violinist Niccolo Paganini, audiences can expect a showcase of exceptional music, dance and artistry.

The Royal Ballet School – A Centenary Celebration | Main Stage

8 – 10 October 2026

In celebration of The Royal Ballet School’s centenary, The Royal Ballet revives gems from the Company archives. Featuring dancers from The Royal Ballet, Birmingham Royal Ballet and The Royal Ballet School, this special programme honours choreographers past and present who have shaped the Royal Ballet Companies. Highlights include a suite from Royal Ballet School Founder Ninette de Valois’s Checkmate, Frederick Ashton’s delightful Birthday Offering and works by influential contemporary choreographers, such as Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon.

Manon | Main Stage

13 October – 25 November 2026

Audio Described performance and Touch Tours on 23 October and 14 November 2026

The Royal Ballet revives Manon, a signature 1974 work by Kenneth Macmillian. Set in the seedy underbelly of 18th-century Paris, where money is king and nothing is sacred – even love itself can be bought for the right price. Torn between her desire for a life of splendour and her devotion to her true love Des Grieux, the capricious Manon pays the ultimate price. Set to Jules Massenet’s score and featuring Nicholas Georgiadis’s decadent designs, this ballet is an excellent example of Macmillian’s acute insight into human psychology and his mastery of narrative choreography.

Madam | Linbury Theatre
3 – 4 November 2026

Dancer, teacher, choreographer and artistic director Dame Ninette de Valois founded The Royal Ballet and her pioneering work set the standard for British ballet. This Season, the Company honours its founder (known as ‘Madam’) with a new, enriching event delving into her enduring impact on The Royal Ballet and the art form. Co-curated by Director Kevin O’Hare and Principal Guest Artist Lauren Cuthbertson, Madam features excerpts from signature De Valois ballets including The Rake’s Progress, Checkmate and Job, alongside insightful conversation, discussion and film.

Visionaries: Robbins and MacMillan | Main Stage

9 – 28 November 2026

Visionaries: Robbins and MacMillan highlights two 20th century masterpieces. Jerome Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering opens the programme. Created in 1969 for New York City Ballet, it was performed the following year by The Royal Ballet in London to great acclaim. Set to Fryderyk Chopin’s piano melodies, Robbins’s buoyant choreography underpins a series of plotless dances, each a portrait of human connection and together a joyful kaleidoscope of shifting moods. Alongside it is Kenneth MacMillan’s Song of the Earth. Created four years earlier, MacMillan’s elegiac and earthbound choreography expresses the metaphysical themes in Gustav Mahler’s score, such as the transience of life and the imminence of death, drawing on 8th-century Chinese poems that inspired both composer and choreographer. Together, the works convey profound meditations on humanity, community and connection.

The Royal Opera

Don Giovanni | Main Stage
10 September – 15 October 2026

Opening the Season, Mozart’s Don Giovanni returns with an all-star cast. Gordon Bintner takes on the title role of opera’s infamous lothario, alongside Rachel Willis-Sørensen as Donna Anna and Roberto Tagliavini as Leporello. Aigul Akhmetshina and Georgia Mae Ellis share the role of Donna Elvira, while Bogdan Volkov and Emmanuel Fonoti-Fuimaono perform as Don Ottavio. Directed by Kasper Holten with spectacular sets from acclaimed designer Es Devlin, the production captures the debauchery and desire at the heart of the opera, while illuminating the sharp emotional tension that cuts through Mozart’s darkest work. Stefano Montanari conducts the dazzling score featuring Leporello’s famous Catalogue Aria (‘Madamina, il catalogo è questo’) and Don Giovanni’s spirited Champagne Aria (’Fin ch’han dal vino  calda la testa’, or ’Til they are tipsy’).

Alcina | Main Stage
15 September – 3 October 2026
Audio Described performance and Touch Tour on 25 September 2026, BSL and Captioned performance on 3 October 2026

Richard Jones’ Olivier Award-winning production receives its first revival. Composed in 1735 for Covent Garden, Handel’s Alcina is an irresistible treat with a strong female heroine, fantastical storyline and magical plot-twists. Several members of the original cast return to their acclaimed roles. Emily D’Angelo performs the lovestruck Ruggiero and Lisette Oropesa is the glittering Alcina – an enchantress who lures her lovers to her island and transforms them into animals when she tires of them. The score includes several firecracker arias, including Ruggiero’s wistful aria, ‘Verdi prati’, Morgana’s acrobatic ‘Tornami a vagheggiar’ and Alcina’s barnstorming ‘Ma quando tornerai’.

New Series: Dark Nights | Linbury Theatre
23 September and 9 November 2026

The Royal Opera launches Dark Nights, a new series of one-off Linbury Theatre performances from leading vocal innovators and experimental composers. Occupying evenings when the stage would otherwise be dark, these events give artists the space to showcase bold, boundary‑pushing work. Composer, singer and actor Keeley Forsyth opens the series on 23 September with HAND TO MOUTH TO. Based on her 2025 EP Hand to Mouth, created with long-time collaborator Matthew Bourne, this expanded live performance transforms the record into a multi-layered live experience, with projections created in response to the Linbury Theatre’s architecture. On 9 November contemporary vocalist, movement artist and composer Elaine Mitchener curates LATE JOYS. This “alt-variety evening” brings together a creative troupe of performers, spanning voice, instrumentation and movement. The night unfolds as a sequence of provocations, encounters, interventions and happenings, inviting audiences into a playful and unpredictable shared experience. Five performances will take place across the Season, with future artists still to be announced.

New Production: Parsifal | Main Stage
1 – 17 October 2026

Internationally acclaimed director Evgeny Titov delivers a bold debut production for The Royal Opera, bringing Wagner’s all-consuming final opera to pulsating life. Parsifal is a shimmering, revelatory musical experience in which religious ecstasy meets agony, awe and hope. With set design by Etienne Pluss, lighting design by D. M. Wood and video design by Christopher Ash, this new staging takes on a breathtaking, dreamlike and dystopian feel. Music Director of The Royal Opera Jakub Hrůša conducts the radiant score leading a stellar cast including Stanislas de Barbeyrac in the title role, Ekaterina Gubanova as Kundry, Christian Gerhaher as Amfortas and Brindley Sherratt as Gurnemanz.

4.48 Psychosis | Linbury Theatre 
17 – 25 October 2026
All dates will be audio described

Ten years after its 2016 premiere at Lyric Hammersmith, composer Philip Venables and director Ted Huffman’s critically acclaimed opera makes its highly anticipated debut in the Linbury Theatre. Based on the devastating 2000 play by Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis is an unflinching portrait of fury and despair, charting the fragmented mind of a patient struggling with clinical depression and the often-violent clash between selfhood and psychiatric intervention. Pulsing with urgency, the opera’s elliptical text is underpinned by Venables’s strirring, and at times, startling, score. Six singers cut to the heart of Sarah Kane’s text while conductor Naomi Woo draws out the moments of clarity, anguish and fleeting hope that colour the music.

New Production: Un ballo in maschera | Main Stage
30 November – 18 December 2026

Philipp Stölzl, renowned director of opera, theatre and film, makes his Royal Opera debut with a playfully surreal new production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera (A Masked Ball). Loosely based on real historical events, the opera recounts Sweden’s King Gustav III’s (1746–1792) assassination at the hands of an aggrieved nobleman and a fortune-teller who allegedly predicted the king’s tragic fate. This visually arresting staging illuminates the inherent theatrics of the opera, emphasised by Antony McDonald’s costume design, lighting by Fabiana Piccioli and Stölzl’s rotating sets. Music Director of The Royal Opera Jakub Hrůša conducts Verdi’s richly layered score, leading an all-star cast of Charles Castronovo, Malin Byström, Aleksei Isaev, Anita Rachvelishvili and Kseniia Nikolaieva.