An awards night is a dinner with a focal point, and the focal point ruins most layouts. Rounds are comfortable for eating and terrible for watching — a third of the room ends up with its back to the front.
The answers are a horseshoe, a shallow arc of rounds, or accepting that people will turn their chairs. The hall is wide rather than deep, which helps: at two hundred guests nobody is sixty feet from the front.
What to confirm early
Audio-visual is the thing to settle first and it is the thing most often left last. Tell us what the evening needs — microphone, screen, lectern, lighting for photographs of winners — and we will tell you plainly what is here and what you would bring in. We would rather say so now than on the night.
Photographs of award winners want a clean backdrop and enough light. Worth a conversation at the tour rather than an improvisation at nine o'clock.