Royal Ballet and Opera announces ambitious 2024-25 season – and name change

2024-25 programme includes premieres of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s opera Festen and Wayne McGregor’s Margaret Atwood ballet MaddAddam

Eight new productions, a world premiere, a European premiere – and a name change: the Royal Ballet and Opera, as it is now to be known, announced on Tuesday an ambitious programme across the main and the Linbury stages for the 2024-25 season.

The world premiere will be Mark-Anthony Turnage’s opera Festen based on Thomas Vinterberg’s cult 1998 film, which also became a successful stage play. Lee Hall has written the libretto, Richard Jones will direct, Edward Gardner conducts and the cast includes Allan Clayton, Eva-Maria Westbroek and Gerald Finley. Other new opera productions include Ted Huffman (who previously directed an acclaimed 2016 staging of Philip Venables’ 4.48: Psychosis) making his main stage debut with Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin; Offenbach’s the Tales of Hoffman directed by Damiano Michieletto (a co-production which debuted in Sydney last year); and a Leonard Bernstein double bill, marking the first time his two short operas Trouble in Tahiti and A Quiet Place have been staged at Covent Garden.