Martyn’s Law for Theatres

A theatre has the same four public protection procedures to think about as any standard-tier venue — evacuation, invacuation, lockdown and communication — but it has to run them around something most venues do not have: a live show, with an audience seated in the dark, performers on stage, and a crew working to cues. That single fact reshapes every procedure, because the moment you need to act may be mid-performance, and the people best placed to act are concentrating on the show.

Mid-size theatres almost always fall in the standard tier — a sold-out house of a few hundred, plus cast, crew, front of house and bar staff, sits comfortably in the 200 to 799 band. So the question is rarely whether you are in scope. It is whether your procedures genuinely work with a curtain up, and that is a more demanding test than it first looks.

Your capacity basis starts with the easy part: licensed capacity and the seating plan give you the audience figure, and box office history at a sold-out peak confirms what you really fill to. But the audience is only part of the same-time number. A production can have a sizeable company — cast, stage management, technical crew, musicians — and on a touring week that includes a visiting company you may not employ.

Add front of house, bar and stewarding staff to that, and the real figure on a full night is well above the seat count alone. Record it per production where companies vary in size, and keep the rotas that back it up. The number you can defend is the sold-out house plus everyone in the building to make the show happen.

The defining question for a theatre is deceptively simple: who has the authority to stop the performance? In an emergency, seconds spent working out whether it is acceptable to halt the show are seconds lost. So show-stop authority needs to be named in advance, for every production — and that includes touring weeks, where the person on the book may be a visiting stage manager who has never set foot in your building before this week.

Naming it is not enough on its own; the named person and the company need to know the house — the exits, the front-of-house team, the signal to bring the lights up. This is why the get-in briefing matters so much, and why a stage door propped open for crew and left unstaffed during the show is such a common and serious gap. Authority and access have to be deliberate, not assumed.

Most emergency planning pictures the audience in their seats. For a theatre, the riskiest moment is often the interval, when half the house is on its feet in the foyer and bar, drinks in hand, in a confined space with pinch points. An evacuation plan that only covers the auditorium misses the picture entirely during the twenty minutes that may be the most crowded of the night.

So the interval needs its own thinking: where people actually are, how the foyer and bar empty, and how you communicate to a standing crowd that is not facing a stage. Row-by-row movement plans for stalls, circle and balcony matter for the seated phases, but they have to be paired with a foyer-and-bar plan for the interval, or the procedure has a blind spot at its busiest moment.

Two recurring weaknesses are worth singling out. The first is the visiting company. On get-in days a new set of crew arrives, works your building all week, and frequently never receives the house briefing — so when something goes wrong, the people side-of-stage do not know your exits or your signals. A short, logged briefing on the get-in fixes it.

The second is accessible evacuation. Plans often depend on a single trained person to assist audience members who cannot move quickly — and then that person is not on every rota. Evacuation has to work on every performance, not just the ones where the right individual happens to be in. Build the role into each rota, not into one name. As with every standard-tier venue, the aim is proportionate, practised procedures recorded and dated — achievable calmly before the duties are expected in spring 2027.