More About the Gillian Lynne Theatre

The ground has carried a theatre since the 19th century, starting as a music hall called the Middlesex and known to everyone as the Mogul. It was rebuilt in 1919 as the Winter Garden Theatre, which is where the bars get their names from: the Wintergarden Bar is named for the theatre that stood here, and the room LW hires out is still listed as the Winter Garden and Middlesex Bar. The Winter Garden closed in 1959, sat empty, and was pulled down in 1965.

What opened in January 1973 was the New London Theatre, designed by Paul Tvrtkovic with the stage designer Sean Kenny on Gropius Total-Theater principles and seating 960 on two levels. The idea behind it was flexibility, and the flexibility is still there: a 60-foot revolve can take the stage, the orchestra pit and part of the front Stalls seating round with it, which is why the front section of the Stalls is a different shape from one production to the next. Marlene Dietrich's one-woman show was recorded in the auditorium in November 1972, before the theatre had officially opened at all.

Then it stopped being a theatre. From 1977 it spent several years as a television studio before coming back to theatre use, which is not something many West End buildings can say.

Cats opened here on 11 May 1981, choreographed by Gillian Lynne, directed by Trevor Nunn, using that revolve, and it ran for 21 years until 2002. It was the longest-running West End musical at the time it closed. The rear Stalls you sit in today are largely the seats it played to. War Horse transferred in from the National in 2009 and ran about eight years.

This theatre's record is big, technically bold productions that use a stage most buildings do not have. It produced Cats, and it also produced Gone With The Wind in 2008, which is remembered as one of the West End's great flops. The same stage did both.

The new name went up on 1 May 2018, with a ceremony that June, and made it the first West End theatre named after a woman who was not a queen.

Who was Gillian Lynne?

Dame Gillian Lynne, who lived from 1926 to 2018, was a dancer first and then a choreographer and director. Cats and The Phantom of the Opera are the work most people know her for. She died in July 2018, the same year the theatre took her name.

The story that follows her around is about a classroom. As a girl she could not sit still and her mother was told something was wrong with her, so she was taken to a specialist. He talked to her mother, then put the radio on and took the mother out of the room to watch through the door. The child got up and danced. He told her mother she was not ill, she was a dancer, and she should be taken to a dancing school. She was, and that is the career this theatre is named after.

Past productions

• The Unknown Soldier and His Wife, 1973, with Peter Ustinov. The opening production
• Grease, 1973, with Richard Gere and Elaine Paige
• Cats, 1981 to 2002. Twenty-one years
• Gone With The Wind, 2008
• War Horse, from 2009, for about eight years
• Show Boat, 2016
• School of Rock, 2016 to 2019
• Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cinderella, 2021 to 2022
• The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, 2022 to 2023
• Crazy For You, 2023
• Standing at the Sky's Edge, 2024
• My Neighbour Totoro, from 2025

Other theatres nearby

• Theatre Royal Drury Lane, the grandest building on the same street, about five minutes south
• Novello Theatre, four levels on the Aldwych, about eight minutes away
• Aldwych Theatre, three levels, a couple of streets further on