The house

The Ardenne opened on 14 September 1897 with a performance of Lohengrin that ran forty minutes late because the gas failed in the second act. It burned down fourteen years later, on a Tuesday, between productions and with nobody inside. The rebuild took two years and kept the original façade, the foundation stone and almost nothing else.

The auditorium

Nine hundred and fifty-eight seats across stalls, grand circle, upper circle and eight boxes. The horseshoe is slightly shallower than the 1897 original because the 1913 architects moved the proscenium forward by two metres to gain wing space — a trade that improved the sightlines and cost the house its echo.

The company

Sixty-eight singers and dancers on contract, an orchestra of seventy-two, and a scenic workshop that still builds everything we stage on site. We do not hire in productions and we do not co-produce, which makes us slower and more expensive than we ought to be.

The chandelier

Not original. The 1913 fitting was taken down in 1972 when the ceiling was surveyed and found to be carrying it on two bolts. The present Bellhaven chandelier holds one thousand one hundred drops and is lowered once a year, over three days, to be washed by hand.