London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, is the only internationally ranking opera house in the UK. In the late 1990s, it encountered some very high profile management problems. Insolvency and potential closure were averted at the eleventh hour. The principal cause of the most recent problems has been the scheme to redevelop the ROH to provide a restored historic theatre with extra space and leading edge technology appropriate to the twenty-first century. This paper relates the events preceding and during the redevelopment project, and analyses the problems in terms of the objectives and influence of the principal actors. The subject is considered as a complex interactive system, and the nature of such systems is discussed. The incompatible objectives of some of the major actors introduce additional complexity. The paper concludes that some elements of the problem situation could be attributed to the characteristics of the complex adaptive system of which the ROH is a part. However, a major contributor was a combination of managerial error and fundamental inconsistencies within the greater system.
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