School of Continuous Improvement researchers randomised eleven community theatre venues onto a fifteen-minute interval and found second-half return, bar takings and late returns all unmoved, with only curtain-down time shifting.
Eleven volunteer-staffed venues, 34 performances and 4,118 timed returns, and a twenty-minute standard ratified on the result
Eleven community theatre companies took five minutes off their interval for a season, and the audience came back at exactly the same moment it always had.
Does a Shorter Interval Hold the Second Half?, a paper released today by the School of Continuous Improvement, reports the first randomised evaluation of a duration nobody in the sector could account for. Every venue in the study began its season on the customary twenty-minute interval and crossed over to fifteen minutes on a randomly allocated night, with two observers on the auditorium doors timing 4,118 returns to seat across 34 performances.
Nothing that the companies care about moved. Return by the five-minute mark held at 96 per cent under both durations, bar takings per patron differed by six cents, and late returns were separated by a tenth of a patron in a hundred. The one reliable effect was arithmetic: the show finished 5.1 minutes earlier.
Twenty minutes was not a decision anybody could show us, and it turns out not to have been costing anything either. Both of those are worth knowing, and only one of them is comfortable.
— Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Demo Quarter
The design gave each venue a staged crossover rather than a competing allocation, an approach the team describes as considerably easier to put to a volunteer committee. “An audience appears to be returning to the second half rather than to the end of the interval,” said Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor of the Impact Pathway Atlas. “That reframes the interval as a trading window, which is a more tractable thing to schedule.”
The Indicator Commons has since ratified a Standard Interval Duration of twenty minutes and added interval observance to the fields participating venues attest each year. The University counts a well-measured absence among the results worth putting on the record, and regards the standard built on it as the more durable contribution.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.h6skfa.