40 Fun Facts About Drama and Theatre

Which word for a two-faced person comes from the ancient Greek term for a stage actor?

Hypocrite descends from the Greek hypokrites, a technical term for a stage actor that Athenians thought no fit role for a public figure. Roman disdain for actors helped push the word toward its modern sense.

Which Theban tragedy, Aristotle's model in the Poetics, won only second prize when first staged?

Oedipus Rex won only second place at its first performance, yet Aristotle's Poetics cites it repeatedly as the tragedy that best fits his rules for the genre. Its hero blinds himself on learning he killed his father and married his mother.

Which comedy was on at Ford's Theatre when Lincoln was shot, the gunshot timed to a laugh line?

Our American Cousin was the comedy John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathiser and stage actor, chose so that his gunshot would be masked by the audience's laughter at a famous line. Lincoln watched from the presidential box.

Which stage wish replaces 'good luck', traced by one theory to German pilots' Hals- und Beinbruch?

Break a leg is the English stage idiom for wishing a performer good luck, since saying the words outright is thought to invite the opposite. German has Hals- und Beinbruch, 'neck and leg break', which Luftwaffe pilots used as a luck wish.

Which orange-seller turned comic actress, praised by Pepys, became a mistress of Charles II?

Nell Gwyn began as a teenage orange-girl hawking sixpenny 'china' oranges inside the theatre before joining its actresses at about 14. Pepys praised her comic performances, and she became best known as Charles II's mistress.

Which festival was born in 1947 when eight theatre companies turned up uninvited to perform?

The Edinburgh Fringe started when eight companies arrived uninvited at the inaugural Edinburgh International Festival and performed anyway, giving the world the term 'fringe theatre'. It now fills the city each summer.

Which stage direction, the rear of the acting area, gives its name to an actor who steals a scene?

Upstage is the part of the stage furthest from the audience, so an actor who drifts there forces scene partners to turn their backs on the house to face them, which is where 'upstaging' comes from.

What title has a Punch and Judy puppeteer had since Victorian times, often helped by a 'bottler'?

A Punch and Judy puppeteer has been called a professor since Victorian times, sometimes assisted by a 'bottler' who works the crowd and collects the money. Punch's squawk comes from a swazzle held in the performer's mouth.

Which Muse, often shown with a tragic mask and buskins, presides over tragedy in Greek mythology?

Melpomene is the Muse of tragedy, her name meaning 'to sing' or 'the melodious one', and artists give her a tragic mask, buskins and a crown of leaves. Her sister Thalia presides over comedy.

Which Athenian tragedian did Aristotle credit with adding a third actor and painted scenery?

Sophocles is credited by Aristotle with the third actor, which shrank the chorus's role, and with skenographia, or scene-painting, though rival sources hand the first to Aeschylus and the second to Agatharchus of Samos.

Which Greek tragedian, 'the most tragic of poets' to Aristotle, survives in nineteen plays?

Euripides was called 'the most tragic of poets' by Aristotle, probably for his taste for unhappy endings, and nineteen of his plays survive more or less complete, though Rhesus is often doubted. An alphabetical edition survived by luck.

Which term did Aristotle use for the relief of pity and fear that tragedy works on its audience?

Catharsis is Aristotle's word for what tragedy does 'through pity and fear', and scholars still argue whether he meant a purging, a purification or a rebalancing of those emotions. He first used the term of music, in the Politics.

Which Poetics term, usually rendered 'tragic flaw', comes from a verb meaning to miss the mark?

Hamartia derives from hamartanein, 'to miss the mark', and Aristotle meant a morally neutral error of judgement rather than the character defect that 'tragic flaw' implies. Critics have argued over the gap between the two ever since.

Which comic playwright's The Clouds mocked Socrates so sharply that Plato blamed it for his trial?

Aristophanes caricatured Socrates as a sophist in The Clouds, and Plato singled out the play as slander that helped bring on the philosopher's condemnation, though other satirists had mocked him too. He may have been barely 18 at his debut.

Which heroine defies King Creon's decree, buries her brother Polynices and is sent to a living tomb?

Antigone places her bond with her dead brother above human law and is walled up alive for it, while her sister Ismene refuses to share the deed. Creon's change of heart comes too late to save her.

Which morality play has God send Death for its hero, whom only Good Deeds will follow to the grave?

Everyman is deserted by Fellowship, Kindred, Goods and even Beauty and Strength, and only Good Deeds, too weak at first to stand, goes with him to his reckoning. The English text translates the Dutch play Elckerlijc.

Which Bavarian village has kept a plague-time vow with a Passion Play every ten years since 1634?

Oberammergau's villagers vowed to perform the Passion every ten years if God spared them from the plague; nobody there died of it after the vow, and the first performance followed in 1634. The 1934 season marked 300 years of the promise.

Which nimble commedia dell'arte servant wears a costume of irregular patches and pursues Columbine?

Harlequin, Arlecchino in Italian, is the astute servant forever thwarting his master and competing with the melancholy Pierrot for Columbine; his diamond-shaped patches were a 17th-century Paris fashion adaptation.

Which commedia dell'arte character arrived in England as a marionette in 1662 and became Mr Punch?

Pulcinella was first seen in England in May 1662, when the Bologna-born puppeteer Pietro Gimonde worked a marionette in Covent Garden; the name became Punchinello, then simply Punch. As half of Punch and Judy he is now a British icon.

Which actor-playwright, taught Noh by his father Kan'ami, refined it at shogun Yoshimitsu's court?

Zeami was performing for the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu while still a boy and was schooled at his court in classical literature and philosophy, then wrote the treatises that still define Noh. His fortunes fell under the next shogun.

Which Japanese puppet theatre has three black-robed puppeteers work each main figure in full view?

Bunraku puppets need three visible puppeteers for all but the smallest parts, while a single chanter voices every character; the form took its name from an Osaka theatre opened in 1805. Chikamatsu wrote its classic plays.

Who took the female roles on Elizabethan stages, apprenticed for two or three years, not seven?

Boy players took the female roles because women were barred from the English public stage, serving adult companies as short-term apprentices until actresses replaced them after the Restoration. Some boys' companies played every part.

Which penny-paying playgoers stood in the yard of Elizabethan playhouses, jeered as 'stinkards'?

Groundlings paid a single penny to stand in the yard, or pit, just below the stage, while a second penny bought a seat and a third a cushion in the best spot. Commoners, they were also called penny-stinkers.

Which musical's London opening waited until the Lord Chamberlain lost his power to license plays?

Hair was refused a licence by the Lord Chamberlain, London's stage censor, so its West End opening was held back until the Theatres Act 1968 abolished his powers; it opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre on 27 September 1968.

Which Webster tragedy has a widow strangled on her brothers' orders for secretly marrying Antonio?

The Duchess of Malfi is strangled at her brothers' request for marrying beneath her, and her maid Cariola is throttled too after a fierce struggle, in one of the bloodiest of the Jacobean revenge tragedies.

Which role did Margaret Hughes play in December 1660 as the first woman known on the English stage?

Desdemona in Othello was the part Margaret Hughes played for Thomas Killigrew's King's Company at its Vere Street theatre on 8 December 1660, the earliest recorded appearance of a woman on an English stage. Pepys saw her play it in 1669.

Who in Sheridan's The Rivals is 'as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile'?

Mrs Malaprop gave English the word 'malapropism', and her other gems in Sheridan's comedy include 'the very pineapple of politeness' and 'illiterate him quite from your memory'. The same slip is also called a Dogberryism.

Which Victorian stage genre, named from the Greek for 'song', ran its action to orchestral music?

Melodrama comes from the Greek melos, 'song', plus the French drame, and in its strict Victorian sense meant a play whose action ran to orchestral music or song. The word reached English in 1784.

Which New York-born actor, a London Othello at 17 in 1825, later played before the King of Prussia?

Ira Aldridge became the first African-American actor to build a professional career abroad, touring Europe for four decades and collecting honours from heads of state; he died on tour in Łódź in 1867.

Which Swedish playwright's Miss Julie, with its preface on naturalism, answered Zola's call to arms?

August Strindberg wrote The Father, Miss Julie and Creditors as naturalistic dramas answering Zola's manifesto, while rejecting the well-made-play structure Ibsen had kept. In Miss Julie, character replaces plot as the driving element.

Which Chekhov play was booed at its 1896 premiere, then became the Moscow Art Theatre's triumph?

The Seagull was a disaster on its first night at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, yet Stanislavski's 1898 staging made it the Moscow Art Theatre's breakthrough. The cast opened it mildly tranquilised on valerian drops.

Which Actors Studio director from 1951 is called 'the father of method acting in America'?

Lee Strasberg is considered 'the father of method acting in America', though other respected teachers developed their own versions of 'The Method' from Stanislavski's system.

Whose 'epic theatre' rests on the Verfremdungseffekt, often mistranslated as the alienation effect?

Bertolt Brecht wanted audiences estranged from what they watched so they would think rather than feel, and 'alienation' is a misleading rendering of Verfremdung; he later preferred to call his approach 'dialectical theatre'.

Which label did Martin Esslin coin in 1960 for Beckett, Adamov and Ionesco, with a nod to Camus?

Theatre of the Absurd was Esslin's name for plays in which, as Ionesco put it, 'absurd is that which has no purpose, or goal, or objective', and he took the word from Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus. His 1961 book made the label stick.

Which playwright, his name made by The Caretaker in 1960, won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature?

Harold Pinter's The Caretaker, first staged at London's Arts Theatre Club in 1960, made his name, and over a 50-year career he collected more than 50 awards, the Nobel among them. France added the Légion d'honneur in 2007.

Which playwright ordered Long Day's Journey into Night withheld until 25 years after his death?

Eugene O'Neill had a sealed copy placed in Random House's vault in 1945 with orders that it wait 25 years, but his widow Carlotta had it published in 1956, three years after he died. It brought him a fourth Pulitzer, posthumously.

Which poet-playwright of Blood Wedding and Yerma was shot by Nationalists early in the Civil War?

Federico García Lorca wrote his 'Rural Trilogy' of Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba while touring with his student company La Barraca, and was arrested and shot on the road between Víznar and Alfacar.

Which director's book The Empty Space opens 'I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage'?

Peter Brook defined theatre as 'any space in which theatre takes place' in a book grown from lectures, the first on 'The Deadly Theatre' at Manchester University in 1965. It sorts theatre into Deadly, Holy, Rough and Immediate.

Which arch frames a conventional stage like a picture, dividing the acting area from the auditorium?

The proscenium arch frames the stage like a picture and descends from the Roman proscaenium, the decorated front dropping from the stage to the orchestra floor, 'in front of the skene'. Roman audiences, too, all watched from the front.

Which staging, also called arena theatre, seats the audience on every side of a central acting area?

Theatre in the round puts the stage at the centre with spectators on all sides, so parts of the audience are lit and visible, and exposed lighting rigs become part of the show. Nobody gets a back wall to hide behind.