Arts Theatre London

The Art's Theatre is a 350 seat Theatre in the heart of London's West End Theatre Land, adjacent to Leicester Square.

The Art's Theatre is steeped in theatrical history. The theatre which opened in Great Newport Street, off St Martin’s Lane in 1927 was intended for the production of new, unlicensed and experimental plays for audiences consisting of subscribing members. Several of its productions transferred to commercial theatres, most notably Gordon Daviot’s Richard of Bordeaux (1932).

Alec Clunes took over the theatre in 1942, producing over a hundred plays in the course of a decade and had the theatre raised to the status of a ‘pocket national theatre’. Clunes’ successor Sir Peter Hall was responsible for the staging of the English premiere in 1955 of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which ran for three hundred performances. In 1960 the Arts staged The Caretaker by Harold Pinter which then subsequently transferred to the West End of a long and successful run.

The Arts now operates as a the West End's smallest commercial receiving house