London theatre reviews and interviews
Plays that are more than three hours long seem to be popular this year as does starting them at 7.30pm rather then scheduling them a bit earlier. This is a particular bug bear of mine and the issue arose again today when I checked the running time of Le Blancs at the National Theatre: 3 hours and 15 minutes with a 7.30pm start. So I took to Twitter to vent my frustration and turns out I'm not alone:
I think theatreland could do with carrying out some customer discovery.
Plays that are over 2 hours with no interval bug me. Make me feel as though they’re afraid everyone might hate it so much that if there was an interval they’d all leave. And even if I don’t need the loo at all, if I know there is a 2.5 (or more!) hour play ahead of me that I won’t be able to return to if I have to leave it, I am full of terror and worry at the possibility I’ll need to leave. I personally think any atmosphere the play may lose from taking a 20 minute break is not worth the proportion of the audience likely looking at watches and wondering if they can last the distance…
Finishing time makes no difference to me. As I don’t live in London I have to spend ridiculous money and time to get to any play in the first place (not much comes anywhere near me.) Once there, ending times are irrelevant. Tubes go on to midnight and once you’ve travelled to London you could usually walk anyway so it wouldn’t matter that much if a play ended at 2am.
I’d think early start times for plays could equally adversely impact upon people expecting the usual 7.30 start time, most particularly those who work late and may book tickets without even thinking about or noticing that the play starts earlier than they’ll be able to make.
I suppose this is the thing: everyone has different issues which will affect them or which merely bother them and it is surely hard to please everyone.
Hi Emma,
Thanks for commenting and completely agree you can’t please everyone. I guess some consistency would be good. Both the Almeida and National Theatre which have had long plays this year have previously started them a bit earlier.
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