What happens at a quarter past ten
Most evening performances in the West End go up at half past seven. Add an interval to a show of normal length and a great many of them come down within twenty minutes of one another, somewhere around a quarter past ten. Within five minutes of the last bow, several thousand people who have been sitting still for two and a half hours are standing on the same narrow pavements: Wellington Street, Catherine Street, Bow Street, St Martin's Lane and Shaftesbury Avenue on either side of Cambridge Circus.
Almost all of them want the same three things. A station, which in practice means Covent Garden with its queue for the lifts or Leicester Square with its crush at the top of the stairs. A taxi, of which there are never enough, and the ride apps know it before you do. Or a table, and the restaurants with lit windows on the obvious streets fill in the time it takes to read the menu posted outside. The whole district tilts towards the stations and Shaftesbury Avenue for half an hour, and anyone moving with that tilt spends the first thirty minutes of the rest of the evening in a queue of some kind.
The rule: walk away from the stations
The crowd moves north and west. The quiet lies south, towards the Strand and the river, and east, towards Aldwych. Four minutes in either direction and the pavement empties as though somebody had closed a gate behind you. The rooms below are chosen because they sit on that side of the tide and because each one is a place you would happily stay in until midnight, not a waiting room until the taxis come back.
Not one of them has any tie to this desk. They appear because the walk to them from the main houses of Covent Garden is short and runs against the flow, which at a quarter past ten is the only direction that matters.
South to the Strand, and Maiden Lane on the way
From the Lyceum or the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane, walk down to the Strand and along to Savoy Court, the short approach where traffic keeps to the right. The hotel there holds two bars of real distinction. The American Bar ranks among the oldest cocktail bars in London, with a long line of bartenders behind it who wrote the recipes other bars still use. The Beaufort Bar is its opposite, black and gilt, built where the hotel's cabaret stage used to stand. After a musical, the Beaufort suits; after something serious, the American Bar lets you talk about it.
If you would rather eat, Maiden Lane runs parallel to the Strand one block north and stays surprisingly still while the streets either side of it roar. Rules is there, which claims the title of London's oldest restaurant, with walls crowded with cartoons and paintings and a menu that leans on game. Tina, who lives a street away, sends people there when they claim to have seen everything. Whether a late table is possible depends on the night, so ask for one when you book the show rather than on the pavement afterwards.
East to Aldwych
A hotel occupies the old Morning Post building on the corner where the Strand meets Aldwych, and its Lobby Bar is a tall, triangular room with windows on two sides and a large sculpture of an oarsman at one end. From the Royal Opera House it is about four minutes on foot, down Wellington Street and across, and it is rarely full at half past ten on a weeknight because the crowd has already turned the other way.
Joe Allen, on Burleigh Street just off the Strand, has fed the West End after the curtain for decades, lately from this address, in a room of brick walls and theatre posters where the cast of whatever you have just seen may well walk in behind you. It is lively rather than quiet, which after a heavy evening in the stalls is sometimes exactly right.
Or wait it out for twenty minutes
The spill is short. By a quarter to eleven most of it has gone underground or into the backs of cars, and the streets that were impassable at twenty past ten are merely busy. Guests who are staying within the district sometimes do the simplest thing of all: stay in their seats until the house has half emptied, walk back to the hotel slowly, and book a late table for eleven rather than fighting for one at a quarter past ten.
The hours before the curtain behave very differently. Getting into WC2 between seven and nine is its own problem, covered in the note on the slowest two hours to cross Zone One, and it is worth reading if the plan is dinner first and the show second.
Company that knows the back of the house
Some companions on the list live close enough to these theatres to hear the interval bells from home. Karolina is four minutes from the Opera House, goes to the ballet properly several times a season, and will talk about what you have just watched in a way that makes you want to see it again. Violetta knows the opera better than most of the people in the stalls and is at her driest over a drink afterwards. Nancy lives by the theatres, sings in a choir, and is the warmest person to sit beside at a late supper.
Karolina and Violetta are both in the raven haired part of the index, Nancy among the blondes, and all three are quite happy to meet you inside the bar you have chosen rather than outside a theatre in the crush.
Booking a night around the curtain
There are two sensible shapes. The first is the whole evening, from an early table to the late bar, which runs to about four hours and sits on the dinner line of the ladder at £900. The second starts after the show: you watch it alone or with colleagues and meet her at a quarter to eleven in one of the rooms above. That one is the late night booking, from £250 for the hour, with two hours at £500 the shortest version that really makes sense of the spill.
Either way, tell the desk the theatre, the running time and the bar you intend to walk to. The reply names the minute she will be there, and it will be a minute on the far side of the crowd.
Cross filed: most of the names in this piece also sit under raven haired in the the index.