As the clock began to tick towards 11pm at Tuesday's night performance of Cirque du Soleil's Kooza, increasing numbers of family groups started to make a dash for the door. Who can blame them? With an 8pm start and a three-hour running time, those with long journeys across London ahead of them would be well aware that nobody in their party was going to get to bed before midnight. Not great if you've got school and an early start in the morning. And of course it's not just a London problem: many people live so far from their nearest theatre that they face long drives to get there and back.

In the 19th century, a night at the theatre meant just that: the entire night. In her book Victorian London, Liza Picard reports that when the singer and actress Madame Vestris appeared at the Lyceum, the performance began at 7pm and was "promised to terminate as near 11.30pm as possible". Such long evenings were not uncommon. The Victorians clearly equated length with quality and wanted to get their money's worth. Maybe public transport was more reliable then, and ran later?

In regional theatres, it's still fairly common to see people leaving early to catch a last bus during long plays. And I know people (many of them in their 20s and 30s, so it's not just an age thing) who have given up going to the theatre on weekdays because early starts just make it too exhausting. A 3pm Sunday matinee has more appeal.

So do producers and theatres really give much thought to the time they start shows – or are they just unimaginatively tied to the traditional starting times of 7.30pm or 8pm whatever the running length, and despite the fact that many people's working patterns are substantially different to 25 years ago? After all, the Wednesday matinee, although less popular than it once was, still exists – and is tied to the outdated convention of half-day closing, which appears to persist nowhere but at my local post office. One of the original reasons for starting a show at 8pm was to give audiences time to go home after work to change for the theatre. Who has time to do that nowadays?

The rise of the shorter show allows for more flexibility in timings, of course: Fiona Shaw's Rime of the Ancient Mariner at the Old Vic Tunnels has showings at 7pm and 9pm, allowing both post and pre-dinner options – or even getting home early and catching up on TV or work. Fuerzabruta at the Roundhouse cleverly plays to a clubbing crowd with its 10pm weekend performances. My pet hate are theatres with two auditoria that stick religiously to 7.30pm and 7.45pm starts for both, even when it ensures that the intervals clash and nobody can get near the bar or the Ladies (if you are female, the horror of interval lavatory queues is one of the more irritating aspects of theatre-going).

Of course what suits one person certainly won't suit another, but with ideas about how theatre is made and distributed in a digital age a hot topic, maybe it's also time to think about whether curtain-up times are in line with 21st-century patterns of work and leisure time. Experimenting more with timings could bring benefits to both box offices and audiences. Or are you happy sticking with tradition?