Curtain-Up Timing: Arriving Before a Fixed Start Time

Fixed starts and everything else

Most journeys have a soft deadline. A dinner reservation can absorb ten minutes, a party does not notice, a meeting waits. A small number of occasions have a hard one: a curtain, a ceremony, a service, a race, a flight. For those, arriving late is not an inconvenience but a partial loss of the thing you booked.

It is worth being explicit about which category your journey falls into, because it changes how much margin is built in. We would rather add twenty minutes to a departure than explain afterwards why it was tight. Twenty minutes spent in a foyer costs nothing; twenty minutes spent in a foyer because you missed the first act costs the evening.

What latecomer policies actually mean

Theatres, concert halls and opera houses all operate latecomer policies, and they are stricter than most people assume. Typically you are held in the foyer, sometimes watching a relay screen, until a suitable break in the performance. For a piece with no early break that can mean the whole first half, and some performances admit nobody at all once they have begun.

Since these policies are set by each venue and reviewed regularly, the sensible assumption is the strict one. Plan to be in your seat before the announced time rather than to arrive at it, and treat the printed start as the moment the doors effectively close.

• Arrival planned to seating time, not to the printed start
• Extra time where tickets must be collected at a box office
• A margin for the walk from a set-down point to the auditorium
• An earlier departure where the venue admits no latecomers

The last mile does the damage

Journeys rarely fail on the motorway. They fail in the final mile, where a road is closed, an event has filled the streets, or a set-down point turns out to be further from the door than expected. That is where the margin belongs, and it is why a departure time is built from the venue backwards rather than from an estimated journey duration.

Around Covent Garden, the South Bank and the West End on a weekday evening, the last half mile can take as long as the rest of the journey. That is not pessimism; it is what the road does between half past six and half past seven.

Early is better than exact

The best answer to a fixed start is to arrive with time to spare and spend it somewhere pleasant. A drink in the bar, tickets collected without a queue, and a seat found without stepping over people is a considerably better start to an evening than a sprint from the pavement.

It also has a practical benefit. If something goes wrong on the way, an early departure gives you options. A departure calculated to arrive exactly on time gives you none. That is the whole argument for margin, and it explains why nobody has ever regretted an early collection on a night like that.

Telling us the deadline, not the destination

The single most useful thing to include in a booking is the time that cannot move and what happens if it does. A curtain at half past seven with a strict latecomer policy is a different instruction from a dinner at half past seven, even though both look identical on a booking form.

Send the fixed time along with the address over WhatsApp on +44 (0) 7775 554 848, and the departure is calculated from it. If the margin looks thin, we will say so before the day rather than on it. It is far better to move a collection by fifteen minutes in advance than to discuss it in traffic on the Strand.

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