Patience, or, Bunthorne’s Bride by W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan was produced at the Opera Comique Theatre under the management of Richard D’Oyly Carte on Saturday 23rd April 1881, and transferred to the Savoy Theatre on Monday 10th October 1881 until Thursday 23rd November 1882.

By 1880 Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas were a success on both sides of the Atlantic. Realising the limitations of the old-fashioned Opera Comique Theatre, and the public’s undiminished appetite for these profitable comic operas, Carte planned a new theatre for them in London’s Strand. Gilbert started a libretto based on The Rival Curates, his 1867 Bab Ballad concerning two clergymen of neighbouring parishes vying with each other for meekness. Concerned about church reaction however, he turned his satire on Oscar Wilde and Aestheticism, changing the Reverends Clayton Hooper and Hopley Porter into Reginald Bunthorne and Archibald Grosvenor, rival poets competing for the affections of the sensible milkmaid Patience, and the Aesthetic maidens who spurn the officers of the Thirty-Fifth Dragoon Guards. Patience opened at the Opera Comique and received even more critical acclaim in October on its transfer to Carte’s brilliant new theatre, complete with electric light. By sending Oscar Wilde on a North American lecture tour at the end of 1881, Carte helped assure its transatlantic success.