Cirkus

A licence, a fire, and Haegglund's rotunda

The house began as a permission rather than a structure. Didier Gautier, a French circus man who took Swedish citizenship in 1830, obtained authorisation to raise a permanent circus building on Djurgården, the former royal hunting park across the water from central Stockholm. In 1869 he sold the menagerie side of the business to Adèle Houcke, and the trade in Stockholm circus seasons carried on under new management.

Fire destroyed the earlier building. The replacement was put up in 1890 and 1891 to designs by the architect and builder Ernst Haegglund, and it was inaugurated on 25 May 1892 under the name Djurgårdscirkus. Haegglund worked in red brick and yellow stucco, with arched wall openings, projecting bays and tower-like roof heads, and the dome was crowned by a four-horse sculpture by Carl Johan Dyfverman. The salon was laid out as an amphitheatre for roughly 2,000 people, wrapped around a ring at floor level.

That geometry is the reason the building still works. A circus rotunda is built so that every row faces one point, and when the ring was eventually replaced by a stage the sightlines came with it. The official name for much of the twentieth century was Cirkusteatern, which records the transition fairly: a circus that had become a theatre without moving house.

Three rebuilds and a protection order

The decisive alteration came in 1931 and 1932, when the ring gave way to a conventional stage and the building was converted for theatre work. Protection followed much later. Cirkus was designated a listed building in 1983, which fixed the exterior and the character of the salon and set the terms for everything done inside it since.

Two further reconstructions shaped the modern room. In 1997 the staging was rebuilt to be flexible and new facilities were added for performers, which is what allowed long musical runs to move in. In 1999 the interior was reworked again to take dinner-theatre audiences, and the operating company has carried the word restaurang in its name ever since.

The site stopped being a single auditorium in 2015, when the Skandiascenen annexe opened to a design by White Arkitekter with around 750 seats. It now trades as Nya Cirkus and seats 784 in cinema layout. Together with the historic rotunda, which the venue business lists at 1,644 seated, and the restaurant and event spaces, Cirkus runs as a three-stage operation on one plot at Djurgårdsslätten.

The seasons that made the house

What Cirkus has instead of a discography is a list of long runs. Kristina från Duvemåla played there in 1998, Chess in 2002, Mamma Mia! in 2006 and Cats in 2009. The pattern held into the next decade with American Idiot and The Phantom of the Opera, both in 2016. These are the productions that turned a listed circus building into the default Stockholm address for commercial musical theatre of a certain scale, too big for a studio and too long-running for an opera house.

Alongside the imported titles the house programmes its own strands. Live på Cirkus puts single-night music and comedy bookings into the rotunda, and the venue has built a seasonal habit around Tomten är far till alla barnen, which sold out at Cirkus across 2024 and 2025 and returns to the building from 19 November to 6 December 2026 before touring other Swedish arenas.

The booking mix is deliberately unsorted. A given month can hold a circus show, a touring tribute band, a singer-songwriter, a stand-up night and a wellbeing lecture, which is the economics of a privately run 1,644-seat room rather than a curatorial position.

Ownership, and the second building

Cirkus has been owned since 2018 by Pophouse Entertainment, whose principal owners are Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA and the EQT founder Conni Jonsson. The venue arm trades as Cirkus Venues and is run by Miramis, and the trading company behind the Djurgården operation is Cirkus Arena och Restaurang AB.

The expansion was announced on 2 June 2023, when Cirkus Venues confirmed it would convert Gasklocka 2 in Norra Djurgårdsstaden into a venue called Gasometer. The gas holder was built in 1899 to designs by Ferdinand Boberg and supplied gas to Stockholm homes for more than a century; the building is owned by the City of Stockholm. The plan sets a main hall, Theater, at 1,750 seated or 2,300 standing, with a separate rooftop space, The Dome, taking up to 1,000 standing or 800 seated under a 17-metre ceiling. Per Sundin, then chief executive of Pophouse Entertainment, framed it at the naming event as two arenas for next-generation entertainment, and Stockholm's finance commissioner Karin Wanngård spoke at the same launch.

That timetable has moved. The 2023 announcement pointed to an autumn 2026 opening; the opening programme revealed in mid-October 2026 is set for 17 to 20 March 2027. The four nights are being built by the Swedish composer Jacob Mühlrad with the artist and creative director Alexander Wessely, designed around the whole interior rather than a fixed proscenium. Julien Planté, previously of KOKO in London, joined as head of entertainment in June 2026. The Royal Swedish Opera will also use Gasometer as a temporary home while its central Stockholm house is rebuilt between 2027 and 2032, which gives the new building an anchor tenant before it has sold its first commercial season.

Where it stands in October 2026

The on-sale calendar at Djurgården runs from early November 2026 through to the following autumn. Alice i Underlandet Cirkusshow, which mixes contemporary circus, acrobatics and theatre, plays the rotunda on 3 and 4 November 2026 at a stated running time of about 110 minutes including an interval. Dr Rangan Chatterjee brings the Thrive Tour Live in on 8 November, Eva Dahlgren plays Revalution Club on 13 November and Kardborreshowen follows on 14 November, before the Tomten run takes the building to early December.

Beyond that the dates thin out and lengthen. Lisa Ekdahl is booked for 14 February 2027 and Simon Superti for Live på Cirkus on 24 February. The Halo Effect bring their European tour to the room on 21 March 2027, Hällas on 28 April, Roger Waters Presents Legacy on 23 May and Rumours of Fleetwood Mac on 27 May. The one long occupancy on the books is & Julia, which takes multiple performances across September and October 2027, with Brit Floyd's Animals 50 landing on 6 October 2027.

Read together, the two strands explain the company's position. The historic house keeps doing what a 1,644-seat listed rotunda does well, while the money and the announcements have moved three kilometres north to a gas holder that will seat more people than Cirkus and hold an opera company for five years.

The room itself

The selling point the venue makes for itself is proximity: a historic building, a park location, and a salon in which the audience sits close to the performers at every show. That is a consequence of the 1892 plan rather than a later refit. Rows rise steeply from the old ring floor, the hall is round rather than deep, and the back of the stalls is nearer the stage than the seat count suggests.

The trade-off is the same one every converted circus has. The stage sits where a ring used to, depth is limited and the flexible staging installed in 1997 is what makes large touring sets possible at all. Shows that need a conventional wide proscenium tend to be reworked for the room, and smaller or seated-cinema formats are routed next door to Nya Cirkus instead.