The Starland Vocal Band were on to something. In their 1976 hit ‘Afternoon Delight’ they sang, in gruesomely twee harmony: ‘Gonna grab some afternoon delight/ My motto’s always been when it’s right it’s right/ Why wait until the middle of a cold, dark night?’ Granted, they were singing about rumpy-pumpy, not theatre-going, but for many of us the same principle applies.
‘I’ve turned into the kind of person who loves toddling off to matinees,’ admitted my actor friend Timmy recently. He’s not the only one. I’m at that age when lunch is preferable to dinner and matinees appeal far more than evening shows. There’s something hedonistic about a matinee. When everyone else is working (or should be), you’re luxuriating in the theatre. And if the production is a dud, it’s far less stressful.
My wife and I once saw an evening performance of Long Day’s Journey Into Night which turned out to be just that. After our theatrical punishment beating we began the freezing assault course of our journey home. Having dodged pools of vomit and jostled our way into a dirty Tube carriage crammed with baying drunks we got home in the early hours, depressed, angry and exhausted. A matinee would have allowed for a consolatory post-mortem over a glass of wine and we would have had the rest of the day to enjoy: the chance to clutch evening victory from the jaws of afternoon defeat.
The rising popularity of matinee idling partly explains why theatre audiences have held up so well. Ticket sales are now back to pre-pandemic levels and, in some cases, afternoon shows are outstripping their evening counterparts.
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