90 Fun Facts About Drama and Theatre

Which word for a deceiver comes from the ancient Greek term for a stage actor?

Hypocrite comes from Greek hypokrites, a stage actor, whose related verb also meant to play a part or pretend, probably how an actor's word came to mean a pretender.

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

Oedipus Rex supplies Aristotle's example of reversal: the messenger who comes to cheer Oedipus reveals who he is and produces the opposite effect.

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

Our American Cousin gave John Wilkes Booth his chance: the actor learned only that morning that Lincoln would attend that night's performance.

Which Shakespeare play do superstitious actors refuse to name inside a theatre, for fear of bad luck?

Macbeth's curse comes with a traditional cure: the offender leaves the theatre, turns around three times, spits and swears, then knocks to be let back in.

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

Nell Gwyn went from selling oranges inside the theatre to its stage, and Pepys once found her backstage cursing because so few people were in the pit.

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 professor's booth followed the holiday crowds to the seaside, where Punch and Judy became a staple of British beaches.

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

Melpomene was probably, like all nine Muses, first a goddess of song, and tragedy became hers only later, when the Muses' arts were split up.

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

Sophocles's third actor let more characters clash on stage at once, widening the conflicts and plots a tragedy could hold.

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 first meant physical cleansing, and Aristotle borrowed it for the mind in both the Politics, on music, and the Poetics; its exact sense is still debated.

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 saw The Clouds finish last of three at its 423 BC festival, and he later revised the play after that poor reception.

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, Beauty and Strength; only Good Deeds, too weak to stand until he confesses his sins, goes into the grave with him.

Which Bavarian village first staged its Passion Play in 1634 to keep a vow made during a plague?

Oberammergau's villagers vowed in 1633, and legend says no one else died of plague after that; the first play was staged in the graveyard, before the victims' graves.

Which commedia dell'arte servant wears a costume of irregular coloured patches?

Harlequin's name may come from Hellequin, leader of a night-riding troop of demons in French legend, though some scholars doubt the link.

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

Pulcinella reached England with Bologna puppeteer Pietro Gimonde, and Samuel Pepys called his Covent Garden show 'very pretty, the best that ever I saw'.

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

Zeami, son of Kan'ami, wrote treatises on Noh's art, but a later shogun, Ashikaga Yoshinori, turned against him and exiled him to Sado Island.

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

Bunraku was at first the name of one Osaka theatre, named after puppeteer Uemura Bunrakuken, before it came to mean the whole art.

Who took the female roles on Elizabethan public stages?

Boy players stood in because women were kept off England's public stage until the Restoration, when the new royal companies began casting actresses.

Which penny-paying playgoers stood in the yard of Elizabethan playhouses?

Groundlings took a jab from Shakespeare himself: Hamlet scorns ranting actors who 'split the ears of the groundlings', who, he says, are for the most part capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise.

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

Hair opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre the night after stage censorship ended, and its run there ended only when part of the theatre's ceiling collapsed in 1973.

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

The Duchess of Malfi retells a real scandal: Giovanna d'Aragona, Duchess of Amalfi, secretly married her steward, Antonio Beccadelli, after her husband died.

Which role did Margaret Hughes, often credited as England's first professional actress, become the first woman known to play?

Desdemona went to a woman on 8 December 1660, though no record names who played her that night, and some historians give the honour to Anne Marshall.

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

Mrs Malaprop gave English the word 'malapropism' for her slips, such as praising Captain Absolute as 'the very pine-apple of politeness'.

Which Victorian stage genre, in its strict sense, set its action to orchestral music?

Melodrama, from Greek melos, 'song', later dropped its music, and the word now means any sensational story with exaggerated emotion.

Which New York-born actor, a London Othello in the 1820s, died on tour in Łódź?

Ira Aldridge left New York for England in 1824 to escape the discrimination black actors faced in the United States, and he made his career in Britain and Europe.

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

August Strindberg's Miss Julie premiered in Copenhagen in 1889, but no Swedish theatre staged it until 1906.

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

The Seagull gave the young Moscow Art Theatre its identity, and a stylised seagull designed by Fyodor Schechtel became the company's emblem.

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

Lee Strasberg played gangster Hyman Roth opposite his former student Al Pacino in The Godfather Part II, and the role earned him an Oscar nomination.

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 for the plays of Beckett, Adamov and Ionesco?

Theatre of the Absurd had a champion at the BBC too: Esslin ran its radio drama department and helped make continental playwrights known in Britain.

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

Harold Pinter's earlier play The Birthday Party had initially failed, before The Caretaker turned his career around.

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 was shot on the road between Víznar and Alfacar, and his remains, thought to lie in an unmarked mass grave, have never been found.

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

Peter Brook's 1970 A Midsummer Night's Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company swapped the forest near Athens for a bare white box.

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

The proscenium arch marks the invisible 'fourth wall' of realist drama, so 'breaking the fourth wall' means an actor speaking straight to the audience.

Which Shakespeare play was on stage when a theatrical cannon set the original Globe Theatre on fire?

Henry VIII was playing in June 1613 when a cannon fired for special effects set the thatched roof alight and burned the first Globe to the ground.

Which sound is banned backstage because sailor stagehands once used coded versions as scenery cues?

Whistling could confuse the crew into flying scenery in or out at the wrong moment, with a real risk of injuring whoever stood beneath it.

Which theatre-going word, borrowed from French in 1848, comes from that language's word for morning?

Matinee came to mean an afternoon show because the French morning word had already stretched to cover any entertainment held in the daytime.

Which stage lighting, made by heating a cylinder of calcium oxide in a flame, first lit Covent Garden in 1837?

Limelight was replaced by electric lighting long ago, yet anyone in the public eye is still said to be standing in it.

Which Agatha Christie whodunit, opened in London in 1952, began as a radio play for Queen Mary's birthday?

The Mousetrap has had the longest run of any play anywhere, and its audiences are traditionally asked not to reveal the twist ending after they leave.

Which Shakespeare tragedy was moved to the street gangs of 1950s Manhattan for the musical West Side Story?

Romeo and Juliet reached the Jets and the Sharks only after a first draft called East Side Story, about a Catholic family and a Jewish family, was shelved.

Which sixth-century BC Greek, by tradition the first actor, is said to have toured with masks in a horse-drawn wagon?

Thespis won the first documented contest for the best tragedy in Athens in 534 BC, and actors are still called thespians after him.

Which 1904 London stage play asks its audience to clap their hands to save a dying fairy?

Peter Pan opened at the Duke of York's Theatre with Nina Boucicault in the title role, the first of many women to play the part on stage.

Which French playwright collapsed on stage in 1673 while playing the hypochondriac in a comedy of his own?

Molière finished that performance of The Imaginary Invalid despite a coughing fit and a haemorrhage, then died at home a few hours later.

Which Japanese theatre form, known for kumadori make-up, has been all-male since women were banned in 1629?

Kabuki is credited to a woman, Izumo no Okuni, said to be a former shrine maiden, whose troupe of female dancers first performed in a dry riverbed in Kyoto in 1603.

Which Shakespeare tragedy has a Danish prince hold up the skull of the dead court jester Yorick?

Hamlet was staged with a real skull in 2008, when David Tennant held that of pianist André Tchaikowsky, who had left it to the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Which American playwright used the Salem witch trials in The Crucible as an allegory for McCarthyism?

Arthur Miller was himself questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956 and convicted of contempt of Congress the next year for refusing to name people he had seen at meetings.

Which Irish wit wrote The Importance of Being Earnest, a comedy that turns on a baby left in a handbag?

Oscar Wilde enjoyed a triumphant opening night in 1895 even as the Marquess of Queensberry schemed, without success, to throw a bouquet of rotten vegetables at him.

Which George Bernard Shaw play about a Cockney flower girl's speech lessons became the musical My Fair Lady?

Pygmalion was first staged not in English but in German, opening at Vienna's Hofburg Theatre in October 1913, six months before London saw it.

Which fading Southern belle moves in with Stella and Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire?

Blanche DuBois reaches the French Quarter on a real streetcar line called Desire, and Tennessee Williams wrote the part with Tallulah Bankhead in mind.

Which Samuel Beckett play leaves two men, Vladimir and Estragon, talking beside a tree on a country road?

Waiting for Godot was written and first performed in French, and when Beckett put it into English himself he gave the dialogue touches of Dublin idiom.

Which Greek god was honoured by the Athenian spring festival where tragedies competed for a prize?

Dionysus was honoured with processions and sacrifices before the plays began, and comedies joined the festival programme only in the 480s BC.

Which writer-performer created the hip-hop musical Hamilton and starred as its title character on Broadway?

Lin-Manuel Miranda found his subject on holiday in Mexico in 2008, when he read Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton during a break from In the Heights.

Which Shakespeare comedy has the weaver Nick Bottom given a donkey's head by the mischievous Puck?

A Midsummer Night's Dream then has the fairy queen Titania wake and fall for the donkey-headed Bottom, after Oberon puts magic flower juice on her eyes.

Which backstage lounge, where performers relax before and after going on stage, is named for a colour?

Green room has no agreed origin: one theory credits a dressing room carpeted in green baize at London's Cockpit-in-Court theatre in 1662.

Which Norwegian playwright caused a storm in 1879 when Nora walked out on her husband in A Doll's House?

Henrik Ibsen was pressed into writing a different ending for German theatres, in which Nora stays, and he called the change a barbaric outrage.

Which Victorian duo wrote the comic operas H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado?

Gilbert and Sullivan famously fell out over a new carpet for the lobby of the Savoy Theatre, whose cost their producer had charged to the partnership.

Which heroine of Greek tragedy kills her own sons to punish her unfaithful husband Jason?

Medea escapes punishment at the end of the play, flying off to Athens in a chariot given to her by her grandfather, the sun god Helios.

Which British Christmas stage tradition has a man in drag play the dame while the audience shouts back?

Pantomime scripts rarely mention Christmas at all: most retell fairy tales such as Cinderella or Aladdin, with the young hero traditionally played by a woman.

Which 1981 West End musical set the poems of a 1939 T. S. Eliot collection to music?

Cats grew into a full musical after Eliot's widow Valerie showed Andrew Lloyd Webber an unpublished poem about Grizabella, left out of the book as too sad for children.

Which French mime artist, famed for his stage persona Bip the Clown, called his craft the art of silence?

Marcel Marceau first used mime in wartime France, to keep Jewish children quiet while he helped them escape to Switzerland.

Which Chicago improv theatre, opened in 1959, was a starting point for Bill Murray, Tina Fey and Steve Carell?

The Second City took its self-mocking name from the title of a series of New Yorker articles about Chicago by A. J. Liebling.

Which 1938 Orson Welles radio drama, staged as news bulletins, convinced some listeners an alien invasion was under way?

The War of the Worlds went out as a Halloween episode of The Mercury Theatre on the Air, and the true scale of the panic it caused is disputed.

Which 1897 French play has a big-nosed soldier-poet woo the beautiful Roxane on behalf of a handsome cadet?

Cyrano de Bergerac was a real 17th-century writer whose large nose the stage exaggerates, and an 1898 translation of the play gave the English word panache its sense of swagger.

Which 1623 book, prepared by two fellow actors, saved eighteen Shakespeare plays that had never been printed?

The First Folio survives in 235 known copies of perhaps 750 printed, and without it there might be no Twelfth Night, The Tempest or Measure for Measure.

Which Russian co-founder of the Moscow Art Theatre devised a famous 'system' of actor training and rehearsal?

Konstantin Stanislavski acted and directed only as an amateur until he was 33, and the famous surname was a stage name: he was born Alekseyev.

Which composer-lyricist wrote Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods after supplying the lyrics for West Side Story?

Stephen Sondheim was mentored as a boy by a neighbour, the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, and is credited with bringing British-style cryptic crosswords to American readers.

Which playwright's A Raisin in the Sun made her the first Black American woman with a play on Broadway?

Lorraine Hansberry took her title from a Langston Hughes poem, and at 29 she became the youngest playwright to win the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award.

Which 1938 play is narrated by a stage manager who shows the audience round the fictional Grover's Corners?

Our Town is performed on a mostly bare stage with the actors miming their props, and it won Thornton Wilder the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Which Christopher Marlowe play has a German scholar sell his soul to the devil in exchange for magical power?

Doctor Faustus is by the same Marlowe who was stabbed to death in a Deptford house in 1593, after what witnesses called a row over the bill.

Which actress kept a satin-lined coffin in her bedroom and was carried in a palanquin after losing a leg in 1915?

Sarah Bernhardt sometimes slept in the coffin or lay in it to study her roles, though she never took it on tour as the popular stories claim.

Which comic genre of slamming doors and mistaken identities takes its name from the French for stuffing?

Farce first named the comic interludes that French actors stuffed into religious plays, and the same root gives cooks the word forcemeat.

Which London street holds a Theatre Royal on the capital's oldest playhouse site, in use since 1663?

Drury Lane has seen four theatres on the spot: one caught fire in 1672, another burned down in 1809, and the present building opened in 1812.

Which Greek tragedian wrote the Oresteia, the only complete trilogy to survive from the ancient stage?

Aeschylus fought the Persians at Marathon, and his epitaph remembers the battle while saying nothing about his success as a playwright.

Which Chekhov play follows the Prozorov family as they long to leave a provincial garrison town for Moscow?

Three Sisters opens with its heroines eleven years out of Moscow, and by the final curtain it is clear they are never going back.

Which ancient Greek theatre, built at a sanctuary of the healing god Asclepius, is prized for near-perfect acoustics?

Epidaurus held up to 14,000 spectators, and ancient dramas are staged there again each summer in a festival that resumed in 1954.

Which name did Shakespeare's acting company take in 1603, when its leading members became Grooms of the Chamber?

The King's Men were renamed when James I became their patron, and each of the nine actors in the royal patent got four and a half yards of red cloth for his coronation procession.

Which American actor spent over twenty years campaigning to rebuild Shakespeare's Globe, then died before it opened?

Sam Wanamaker had settled in Britain for fear of the Hollywood blacklist, and the indoor Jacobean playhouse on the Globe site is named after him.

Which Dublin theatre saw riots in 1907 at the opening of J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World?

The Abbey saw crowds riot so loudly that the actors finished the play in dumbshow, yet in 1925 it became the first state-subsidised theatre in the English-speaking world.

Which medieval Bible dramas were staged by craft guilds on decorated pageant carts in cities such as York?

Mystery plays in the York cycle alone ran to forty-eight pageants, shared out among the city's guilds and telling sacred history from the Creation to the Last Judgement.

Which Nigerian playwright of The Lion and the Jewel won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature?

Wole Soyinka was once charged with holding up a radio station at gunpoint, to swap a premier's recorded speech for a tape alleging electoral malpractice.

Which Roman playwright's comedy of separated twins, Menaechmi, gave Shakespeare the plot of The Comedy of Errors?

Plautus has one twin abducted as a child and the other renamed after him, which is why both men answer to the same name when they finally meet.

Which Restoration playwright of The Rover had earlier been sent to Antwerp as a spy for Charles II?

Aphra Behn was one of the first Englishwomen to earn a living by writing, and Virginia Woolf urged all women to let flowers fall on her tomb in thanks.

Which French theorist called for a 'Theatre of Cruelty' in his 1938 book The Theatre and Its Double?

Antonin Artaud got just one chance to stage his ideas, a 1935 Paris adaptation of Shelley's The Cenci, which closed after 17 performances.

Which playwright turned the 'coughing major' cheating scandal on a British game show into his 2017 play Quiz?

James Graham had the audience vote electronically after each act on whether the major was guilty, and in 2020 the play became a TV drama of the same name.

Which stage convention, often credited to Denis Diderot, has actors behave as though the audience were not there?

Fourth wall thinking goes back to 1758, when Diderot told actors to imagine a huge wall across the front of the stage and behave as if the curtain had never risen.