page_title: Sadler's Wells Theatre
section_title: Fifth theatre
hierarchical_section_title: Sadler's Wells Theatre / History / Fifth theatre
caption_attribution_description: English: Lilian Baylis, painted portrait
context_page_description: Sadler's Wells Theatre is a performing arts venue in Clerkenwell, London, England located on Rosebery Avenue next to New River Head. The present-day theatre is the sixth on the site since 1683. It consists of two performance spaces: a 1,500-seat main auditorium and the Lilian Baylis Studio, with extensive rehearsal rooms and technical facilities also housed within the site. Sadler's Wells is renowned as one of the world's leading dance venues. As well as a stage for visiting companies, the theatre is also a producing house, with a number of associated artists and companies that produce original works for the theatre. Sadler's Wells is also responsible for the management of the Peacock Theatre in the West End, during times not used by the London School of Economics.
context_section_description: By 1925 the proprietor of the Old Vic theatre, Lilian Baylis felt that her opera and drama productions needed to expand. In that year. she invited the Duke of Devonshire to make a public appeal for funds to set up a charitable foundation to buy Sadler's Wells for the nation. The appeal committee included such diverse and influential figures as Winston Churchill, Stanley Baldwin, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, Dame Ethel Smyth and Sir Thomas Beecham. It was not long before enough money had been amassed to buy the freehold.
  Also in 1925, Baylis began collaborating with the ballet teacher Ninette de Valois, a former dancer with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. At the time, de Valois was teaching in her own dance school, the Academy of Choreographic Art, but had contacted Baylis with a proposal to form a repertory ballet company and school. So in 1931 when Sadler's Wells was reopened, de Valois was allocated rehearsal rooms in the theatre and established the Sadler's Wells Ballet School and the Vic-Wells Ballet. The ballet company performed at both the Sadler's Wells and Old Vic theatres. The company grew as the school trained new dancers to join the company. The first principal dancers of the Vic-Wells ballet were Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin and the founder choreographer was Frederick Ashton, all three having been working with the Ballet Club of Marie Rambert.
  Designed by F.G.M. Chancellor of Matcham & Co, the new theatre opened on 6 January 1931 with a production of Twelfth Night and a cast headed by Ralph Richardson as Sir Toby Belch and John Gielgud as Malvolio. At the beginning of Baylis's management of Sadler's Wells, it was intended that the two theatres should each offer alternating programmes of drama and opera. This happened for a short while, but it soon became clear that it was not only impractical, but also made dubious commercial sense: drama flourished at the Old Vic but lagged behind opera and dance in popularity at the Wells. The Vic-Wells Opera Company was the name of the opera company performing at Sadler's Wells. By 1933/34 season the drama company under Tyrone Guthrie included a range of acting talent including Charles Laughton, Peggy Ashcroft, Flora Robson, Athene Seyler, Marius Goring and James Mason.
  From 1940, while the theatre was closed during the Second World War, the ballet company toured throughout the country, and on its return changed its name to the Sadler's Wells Ballet. Similarly, the opera company toured to return as Sadler's Wells Opera Company, and it reopened the theatre with the premiere of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes.
  In 1946, with the re-opening of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, the ballet company was invited to become the resident company there. De Valois decided that a second company was needed to continue ballet performances at Sadler's Wells, and so the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet was formed, with John Field as artistic director. The Sadler's Wells company later relocated to Covent Garden, where it was incorporated into the Royal Ballet's charter in 1956, becoming The Royal Ballet Touring Company. After a number of years as a touring group, it returned to Sadler's Wells in 1976, becoming the Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet. In 1987, the Birmingham Hippodrome and Birmingham City Council invited Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet to re-locate to Birmingham. It did so in 1990 and changed its name to Birmingham Royal Ballet. Since the departure of the company, there has not been a resident ballet company at Sadler's Wells.
  The opera company moved out of Sadler's Wells Theatre to the London Coliseum in 1968 and was later renamed English National Opera. Sadler's Wells Theatre then became a temporary home both for foreign companies and those within the UK looking for a metropolitan shop-window. In addition, Sadler's Wells, strategically near but not in the West End, was seen as the ideal launching pad for artists at the outset of their careers. Throughout the 1970s a rich diversity of attractions appeared at Sadler's Wells, recapturing something of its former eclecticism. P
caption: Lilian Baylis, creator of the fifth Sadler's Wells theatre
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