The Shaftesbury Theatre will carry the name of Dame Judi Dench from February 2027, a tribute from owners whose association with the actress goes back to the Theatre of Comedy company of the 1980s.
The Shaftesbury Theatre is to become the Judi Dench Theatre in February 2027. The renaming was announced on 16 June 2026 by the building’s owners, DLT Entertainment, the company of the Taffner family, and was reported by Euronews and Playbill on the day. It is the largest independent theatre in the West End.
The owners present the new name as recognition of Dame Judi’s contribution to British theatre, and the link with this particular building is a long one. She was a founding member of the Theatre of Comedy, the collective of actors and writers that held a share in the Shaftesbury and kept it busy with comedies through the 1980s and 1990s. She also spent nine series in As Time Goes By, the BBC sitcom made by the Taffners’ DLT Entertainment.
“The Shaftesbury Theatre has always held a special place in my heart,” Dame Judi said. “My relationship to the Theatre of Comedy and to the Taffner family goes back many years, and to have this beautiful theatre renamed after me is truly overwhelming. Live theatre continues to be so important as a way of telling stories and entertaining audiences, something I have aimed to do all my working life.”
For the owners, Donald Taffner Jr said the family had “such fond memories” of her at the Shaftesbury and were “delighted to recognise her extraordinary talent”. Eleanor Lang, who runs the theatre, put the change in a wider frame: “We don’t celebrate brilliant women enough in our West End theatre names.”
The building opened in 1911 as the New Prince’s Theatre, the first steel-framed theatre in the West End, and took the Shaftesbury name in 1962 in memory of the original Shaftesbury Theatre, which was destroyed in the Blitz. A refurbishment, including the restoration of its auditorium dome, is being carried out while performances continue.
The current tenant, the 20th anniversary production of Avenue Q, plays its final performance under the old name on Sunday 3 January 2027. Next in is The Notebook, the Broadway musical based on Nicholas Sparks’ novel, which is due at the Judi Dench Theatre from March 2027 for its UK premiere, as we reported this morning.
Avenue Q is booking at the Shaftesbury Theatre until 3 January 2027, and The Notebook from March 2027.
Photo: Shaftesbury1911 via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped.
