100 Fun Facts About Theatre

Which Shakespeare tragedy won't actors name inside a theatre, calling it 'the Scottish play'?

Macbeth is said to carry a curse with its own cleansing ritual: the offender must leave the theatre, turn three times, spit over the left shoulder and swear before being let in again. Legend blames real witches' spells in the script.

What is the lone bulb left burning on an empty stage overnight called, a habit some trace to gas-lit theatres?

A ghost light has a practical job as well as a spooky one: it stops anyone crossing a pitch-dark theatre from falling into the orchestra pit. One theory says gas-lit theatres kept a dim flame burning to relieve pressure on the gas valves.

Which Agatha Christie whodunnit opened in the West End in 1952 and asks audiences to keep its twist secret?

The Mousetrap is by far the world's longest-running play, and Christie gave its rights to her grandson Mathew Prichard as a birthday present.

Which Greek is credited as the first person to act a character on stage rather than speak as himself?

Thespis is why actors are called thespians, yet the fragments once credited to him are thought to be forgeries, some probably by Heraclides of Pontus.

What set the original Globe Theatre's thatched roof ablaze in 1613, during a performance of Henry VIII?

A stage cannon fired during the play set the thatch alight; by one surviving account the only casualty was a man whose burning breeches were put out with a bottle of ale.

Which word for knockabout comedy comes from a two-slat wooden paddle used by commedia dell'arte clowns?

Slapstick was a paddle of two slats built to crack loudly on contact while barely hurting the actor struck, so a blow sounded far worse than it was.

Broadway's Tony Awards are named after which actress-director, the American Theatre Wing's wartime leader?

Antoinette Perry had died in 1946, and the Wing created the awards the next year in her honour.

In which Samuel Beckett play, first staged in 1953, do two tramps loiter by a tree for a man who never comes?

Waiting for Godot reached London in 1955 under director Peter Hall, who admitted he hadn't 'the foggiest idea' what some of it meant.

Which Japanese theatre form, begun by a female dancer named Okuni, turned all-male after women were banned from it?

Kabuki's female troupes grew so popular that fights broke out among audiences, which led the shogunate to ban women from the stage.

Which term for public attention comes from a 19th-century stage lamp that heated a cylinder of calcium oxide?

Limelight was first built by Thomas Drummond for surveying, before theatres beamed it onto star performers, which is why fame puts you 'in the limelight'.

Which salesman, father of Biff and Happy, is the broken hero of Arthur Miller's 1949 tragedy?

Willy Loman begs his boss Howard for a job in New York so he can stop travelling, and gets fired instead.

Which Arthur Miller play dramatises the 1692 Salem witch trials as an allegory for McCarthyism?

The Crucible's author was hauled before HUAC himself in 1956, and Arthur Miller was found guilty of contempt of Congress for defying the committee.

Which Norwegian playwright wrote A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler?

Henrik Ibsen's ending, with Nora walking out on her husband and children, so upset his German leading lady that he had to write a gentler ending for Germany.

Which Russian playwright's rule says a rifle shown in act one must be fired by the final act?

Anton Chekhov was a qualified doctor who called medicine his principal profession, even though it was his writing that paid the bills.

Which Moscow Art Theatre co-founder devised the 'system' of actor training many equate with the American Method?

Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko planned the Moscow Art Theatre in a single conversation that ran for more than fifteen hours.

Which Irish playwright won the 1925 Nobel Prize and then an Academy Award for adapting his own Pygmalion?

Bernard Shaw disliked having his plays turned into musicals, yet after his death in 1950 Pygmalion became My Fair Lady.

Which mother in The Importance of Being Earnest rejects Jack as a suitor after learning he was found in a handbag?

Lady Bracknell's play opened on 14 February 1895, and within months Oscar Wilde had been convicted and jailed after the trials that followed his libel case.

Which Paris troupe was created in 1680 when Louis XIV merged the city's rival acting companies?

The Comédie-Française's actors were arrested during the Revolution in 1793, and the troupe was only reunited in 1799.

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

Molière, born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, finished that performance of The Imaginary Invalid despite a violent coughing fit, and died at home the same night.

Which Victorian actor-manager of London's Lyceum became the first actor to be knighted, in 1895?

Henry Irving's success as Mathias in The Bells turned round the Lyceum's failing fortunes, and he later ran the theatre with Ellen Terry as his leading lady.

Which French actress, famous for playing Hamlet and sleeping in a coffin, had a leg amputated in 1915?

Sarah Bernhardt kept performing after the amputation, even for French troops in the First World War, carried in on a palanquin.

Which Greek theatre at a sanctuary of the healing god Asclepius is rated the ancient world's finest for acoustics?

Epidaurus owes much of its sound to its stepped seat rows, which one study found damp low-pitched crowd sound while passing actors' voices.

Which Latin phrase for a contrived plot rescue recalls a crane used on ancient Greek stages?

Deus ex machina became a standing reproach against Euripides, whose endings often sent a god down to sort out the plot.

Which invisible barrier did Denis Diderot describe in 1758, telling actors to act as if the curtain had never risen?

The fourth wall was later broken on purpose by Bertolt Brecht, whose actors addressed the audience so people would think about the play instead of losing themselves in it.

What do theatres call the backstage lounge where performers wait before and after going on stage?

The green room's name is often put down to such rooms once being painted green, though its origin is uncertain, and big London theatres kept several.

Which Christmas show casts a man as the dame and a woman as the principal boy, with cries of 'He's behind you!'?

Pantomime took off in the 1720s when John Rich, starring as Harlequin himself, used spectacular stage magic to win audiences from a rival theatre.

Which ancient Greek footwear pair, a thin shoe and a high boot, symbolises comedy and tragedy alongside the two masks?

Sock and buskin were stage footwear, and tragic actors had the buskin's soles made unusually thick so they would seem taller and grander.

Which Roman general built Rome's first permanent stone theatre in 55 BC, calling it steps added to a temple of Venus?

Pompey's theatre complex held the Senate hall where Julius Caesar was murdered before a statue of Pompey, the rival he had defeated.

Which playwright's Our Town, narrated by a Stage Manager, shows Grover's Corners on a bare stage with almost no props?

Thornton Wilder cut the scenery on purpose, arguing that what matters in life lies in the mind, 'not in things, not in scenery'.

Which two-part Tony Kushner epic, subtitled 'A Gay Fantasia on National Themes', won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama?

Angels in America puts real-life lawyer Roy Cohn on stage, dying of AIDS while refusing to admit he is gay.

Which Lorraine Hansberry drama about a Chicago family was titled from a Langston Hughes poem?

A Raisin in the Sun borrows Langston Hughes's question of whether a dream deferred dries up like a raisin in the sun, or explodes.

Whose Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was denied the Pulitzer Prize for Drama?

Edward Albee went on to win three Pulitzers for other plays, including A Delicate Balance and Three Tall Women.

Whose Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead had two Hamlet bit-parts flipping coins at the 1966 Edinburgh Fringe?

Tom Stoppard was born Tomáš Sträussler in Czechoslovakia, fled the Nazis as a child, and later won an Oscar for co-writing Shakespeare in Love.

Which open-air playhouse in Rowena Cade's Cornish cliff garden opened in 1932 with The Tempest played against the sea?

Rowena Cade spent winter after winter building up the Minack Theatre herself, and died in 1983 just short of her 90th birthday.

Which Dublin playhouse, co-founded by W. B. Yeats, had riots at its 1907 premiere of The Playboy of the Western World?

The Abbey Theatre's Playboy company was arrested in Philadelphia in 1912 for staging an immoral play, though the charges were later dismissed.

Which Alfred Jarry play caused a riot at its 1896 Paris premiere, opening with a distorted French swear word?

Ubu Roi began as a schoolboy parody of one of Alfred Jarry's teachers, and that caricature grew into the tyrant Ubu.

Which layout extends the acting area into the audience on three sides, as at Shakespeare's Globe?

A thrust stage echoes England's first playhouses, which are said to have grown from players putting up a platform in an inn yard with galleries all around.

What word describes a stage sloping up and away from the audience, the origin of the terms 'upstage' and 'downstage'?

A raked stage makes 'upstaging' literal: an actor who moves up the slope forces a colleague nearer the audience to face away from the house.

Which backstage habit is taboo because it was once used to cue scene changes?

Whistling was once how scene changes were cued backstage, so a stray whistle could send scenery flying in or out at the wrong moment.

Which word for flamboyant self-assurance did English borrow from Edmond Rostand's 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac?

Panache is the one thing the dying Cyrano says he keeps, though the French word first meant a plume of feathers worn on a hat.

Which Michael Frayn farce follows a company wrecking a sex comedy called Nothing On, plates of sardines and all?

Noises Off came to Michael Frayn while he watched one of his own farces from the wings and found it funnier from behind than in front.

Which Peter Shaffer play about a boy who blinds six of the animals he worships put Daniel Radcliffe on stage in 2007?

Equus's 2007 West End revival required Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe, then 17, to appear naked on stage.

Which John Osborne play, with Jimmy Porter raging while his wife does the ironing, spawned the term 'angry young men'?

Look Back in Anger's 'Angry Young Man' label was coined by a dismissive Royal Court press officer, and it came to stand for a whole generation of writers.

Which Chicago playhouse's 1903 fire, the deadliest theatre fire in US history, led to panic bars and outward-opening doors?

The Iroquois Theatre had been billed as 'absolutely fireproof' when it opened weeks before, yet many of its exits were locked or hidden.

What is a hired body of applauders called, a trade organised enough for a Paris agency to supply them from 1820?

A claque worked under a chef de claque, and the idea is ancient: Emperor Nero had five thousand soldiers chant his praises when he acted.

Which Phoebe Waller-Bridge one-woman show debuted at the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe before becoming a TV series?

Fleabag started when a friend challenged Phoebe Waller-Bridge to fill a ten-minute slot at her stand-up storytelling night.

Which Eugène Ionesco play, born of an English phrasebook, has run at Paris's Théâtre de la Huchette since 1957?

The Bald Soprano got its title when actor Henri-Jacques Huet slipped in rehearsal, saying 'la cantatrice chauve' instead of 'the blonde schoolteacher'.

Which Italian playwright wrote Six Characters in Search of an Author, first staged in 1921?

Luigi Pirandello's play-within-a-play foreshadowed the Theatre of the Absurd, and his ideas went on to inspire Jean-Paul Sartre.

Which playwright, with four shows running on Broadway at once in 1966, had the Alvin Theatre renamed for him in 1983?

Neil Simon started out as a clerk at Warner Bros. in New York, then quit to write radio and TV comedy with his older brother Danny.

Which West End playhouse, the latest of four on a site used since 1663, is London's oldest theatre site still in use?

Drury Lane is where James Hadfield fired at King George III in 1800, and his acquittal as insane led Parliament to pass the Criminal Lunatics Act.

Which children's play has funded Great Ormond Street Hospital since its author gave away the copyright?

Peter Pan has paid its way at the hospital since 1929, when J. M. Barrie handed over the rights and asked that the value of the gift never be revealed.

Which word entered English from Karel Čapek's play R.U.R., built on the Czech for forced labour?

Robot comes from robota, the unpaid toil serfs owed their masters, and the play's factory-made workers end by wiping out humankind. Čapek said his brother Josef was the word's true inventor.

Which pop-psychology term traces back to a Patrick Hamilton stage thriller set in 1880s London?

Gaslighting echoes Gas Light, in which a husband sets out to convince his wife she is going insane. The word caught on through the 1944 film version, whose title ran the two words together.

Which English insult comes from the ancient Greek word for a stage actor, someone who plays a part?

Hypocrite began as hypokrites, the Athenian term for a man who acted in plays, and only later came to mean anyone faking virtue. Greeks thought the job unfit for a public figure.

Which animal, perhaps a prize in Greek choral contests, has its 'song' in the literal meaning of 'tragedy'?

Goat song is the usual reading of the Greek tragoidia, though nobody is sure why. One guess is an animal awarded to the winning chorus; another is singers dressed in skins to play satyrs.

Which musical opened at the Barbican in 1985 to hostile reviews and became the West End's longest-running?

Les Misérables sold out its three-month Barbican run while the critics sneered, then transferred to the West End for good. It had begun in Paris as a French concept album released in 1980.

Which playhouse was staging the comedy Our American Cousin on the night Abraham Lincoln was shot there?

Ford's Theatre went dark after the shooting and spent a century as government offices, a warehouse and a museum. It reopened as a working playhouse in 1968.

Which Shakespeare play has the famous stage direction sending Antigonus off pursued by a bear?

The Winter's Tale has long tempted people to imagine a live animal lumbering on, but most scholars think it unlikely: bears are hard to train and no record shows one on an Elizabethan stage.

Which French mime, creator of the clown Bip, helped smuggle Jewish children to Switzerland in wartime?

Marcel Marceau first used mime to keep the children silent on the way to the Swiss border. Born Marcel Mangel, he took his new surname from a general of the French Revolution.

Which Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, staged in Germany's Bochum since 1988, puts its cast on roller skates?

Starlight Express turns its skaters into toy trains racing through a child's dream, with an obsolete steam engine as the underdog. The German staging holds the record for most visitors to a musical in a single theatre.

Which nimble commedia dell'arte servant wears a mask and a costume of bright diamond-shaped patches?

Harlequin started out in ragged, irregular patches, which 17th-century Paris fashion tidied into neat diamonds. He is the best known of the zanni, the comic servants, and is tied to the city of Bergamo.

Which London diarist made the first record of a Punch puppet show in England, at Covent Garden in 1662?

Samuel Pepys called it an Italian puppet play and found it very pretty. The date, 9 May, is kept as Mr Punch's British birthday, and his ancestor is the Neapolitan clown Pulcinella.

Which Bavarian village has staged a Passion play every decade or so since 1634 to honour a plague vow?

Oberammergau made its promise in October 1633, and the story goes that nobody there died of the disease afterwards. Every part is taken by people who live in the village.

Which term for a verbal slip is named after a character in Sheridan's 1775 comedy The Rivals?

Malapropism honours Mrs Malaprop, who reaches for grand words and grabs the wrong ones. Sheridan built her name from the French mal à propos, meaning inappropriate.

Which city, where a real tram line called Desire once ran, is the setting of A Streetcar Named Desire?

New Orleans had a Desire line running half a block from the French Quarter flat where Tennessee Williams wrote the play. Blanche DuBois rides it to reach her sister's door.

Which cult musical, starring Tim Curry, opened in 1973 in a 63-seat room above London's Royal Court Theatre?

The Rocky Horror Show was written by Richard O'Brien between acting jobs, as a tribute to B-movie science fiction and horror. That first run in the tiny Theatre Upstairs lasted barely a month.

Which 2007 National Theatre play relied on life-size animal puppets from South Africa's Handspring company?

War Horse puts three handlers on each full-size animal, and audiences soon stop noticing them. Michael Morpurgo thought the theatre must be mad to try staging his 1982 novel.

Which actor, founding director of Britain's National Theatre, gives his name to London's top stage awards?

Laurence Olivier led the company from 1963 to 1973, and its largest auditorium carries his name too. The awards began in 1976 and were renamed for him, with his consent, in 1984.

Which Warwickshire town's Memorial Theatre burned down in 1926, sending its festival into a converted cinema?

Stratford-upon-Avon got its replacement in 1932, designed by Elisabeth Scott. It was the first important building in Britain put up to a woman architect's designs.

Which nickname did Broadway's theatre district earn from the blaze of its early electric signs?

The Great White Way was a newspaper coinage of the early 1900s, a nod to the glare of the lights on the district's theatre marquees and advertising signs.

What were the Elizabethan playgoers called who paid one penny to stand in the yard below the stage?

Groundlings take their name from a line in Hamlet, and the word may be a joke: it also meant a small fish with a gaping mouth, much like the upturned faces an actor saw from the stage.

Which 1623 book, compiled by two of Shakespeare's fellow actors, saved eighteen of his plays from loss?

First Folio is the modern name for the collection John Heminges and Henry Condell prepared about seven years after their colleague's death. Without it there would be no Twelfth Night or Julius Caesar.

Which Christopher Marlowe tragedy follows a scholar who trades his soul to Lucifer for 24 years of power?

Doctor Faustus so unsettled early audiences that one tale had actual devils turning up on stage in mid-performance. Its author was stabbed to death in a Deptford house during a row over the bill.

Which leading man of Shakespeare's company was the first actor to play Hamlet, Othello and King Lear?

Richard Burbage was the son of the builder who owned London's first successful permanent playhouse. He was also a painter, and he went on acting until he died.

Which religious faction's hatred of the stage lay behind Parliament closing London's theatres in 1642?

Puritans got their way for 18 years: the ban was lifted only in 1660, once Charles II had taken the throne. Plays written after the gap had a noticeably different character.

Which Restoration actress sold oranges to theatre audiences before becoming a mistress of King Charles II?

Nell Gwyn was hired with her sister as an orange-girl, selling small sweet 'china' oranges for sixpence each. The sellers also carried messages between men in the audience and actresses backstage.

Which author of The Rover, once a royal spy in Antwerp, was among the first Englishwomen to live by writing?

Aphra Behn is buried in Westminster Abbey, and Virginia Woolf wrote that all women owed flowers to her tomb for earning them the right to speak their minds.

Which royal household official licensed and censored every new play in Britain from 1737 to 1968?

Lord Chamberlain became a censor's job under Robert Walpole, who wanted his government shielded from stage satire. The nude musical Hair, refused a licence, opened in London once the power was abolished.

Which Gilbert and Sullivan playhouse in London was the first public building lit entirely by electricity?

Savoy Theatre owner Richard D'Oyly Carte stepped on stage in 1881 and broke a glowing bulb in front of the audience to prove the new lamps were safe. Joseph Swan supplied about 1,200 of them.

Which American actor, a refugee from the Hollywood blacklist, led the rebuilding of Shakespeare's Globe?

Sam Wanamaker died in 1993, four years before the theatre opened, and the indoor playhouse on the site is named after him. His daughter is the actress Zoë Wanamaker.

Which German playwright of Mother Courage used 'epic theatre' to keep audiences at a critical distance?

Bertolt Brecht flew back to Europe the day after testifying to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. He settled in East Berlin and co-founded the Berliner Ensemble with his wife.

Which label did critic Martin Esslin coin in 1960 for the plays of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco?

Theatre of the Absurd took its key word from Albert Camus, whose essay on the myth of Sisyphus described people as strangers in a universe stripped of illusions.

Which American playwright wanted Long Day's Journey into Night kept unpublished until 25 years after his death?

Eugene O'Neill sealed the manuscript in his publisher's vault in 1945, but his widow had it released soon after he died. The openly autobiographical play won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1957.

Which Nobel-winning British playwright saw The Birthday Party close after just eight performances?

Harold Pinter was cheered on by one enthusiastic review from the critic Harold Hobson, and went on to the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature. His name became an adjective, Pinteresque.

Which playwright wrote the séance comedy Blithe Spirit on a Welsh holiday after the Blitz wrecked his flat?

Noël Coward finished it in six days at Portmeirion, and it ran for 1,997 performances in London, then a record for a non-musical play. Margaret Rutherford was the first Madame Arcati, the medium.

Which Irish wit wrote his biblical tragedy Salome in French, only to see it banned from the British stage?

Oscar Wilde fell foul of a rule against putting biblical characters on stage. The only performances in his lifetime were in Paris in 1896, while he was serving a prison sentence.

Which stage ghost story, performed by a cast of only three, played in London's West End from 1989 to 2023?

The Woman in Black began as a Christmas show at a theatre in Scarborough in 1987. By the time its London run ended it had clocked up 13,232 performances.

Which J. B. Priestley play, first staged in the Soviet Union, sends a man named Goole to grill the Birlings?

An Inspector Calls opened in the Soviet Union in May 1945 and reached London only the following year. Its action is set in 1912, at a dinner celebrating a daughter's engagement.

Which Mary Chase comedy gives Elwood P. Dowd an unseen best friend who is a rabbit more than six feet tall?

Harvey is a pooka, a spirit from Celtic folklore that takes animal form, and he is never shown on stage. The comedy won its author the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Which Broadway composer, mentored as a boy by Oscar Hammerstein II, began as the lyricist of West Side Story?

Stephen Sondheim found a surrogate father in his Pennsylvania neighbour, who shaped his love of musical theatre. He later wrote both words and music for Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods.

Which Golden Age Spanish playwright, nicknamed the 'Phoenix of Wits', turned out some 500 stage plays?

Lope de Vega also found time for 3,000 sonnets and nine epic poems. His own tally of plays kept climbing, from 230 in 1604 to a claimed 1,500 by 1632.

Which Japanese puppet theatre, born in Osaka, pairs its puppeteers with a chanter and a shamisen player?

Bunraku needs three operators for all but its most minor characters, and they work in full view of the audience, generally in black robes. The main one controls the puppet's head and right hand.

Which surname links Lionel, Ethel and John, three sibling stars of the American stage and early Hollywood?

Barrymore was a borrowed stage name: the siblings' father was born Herbert Blyth in India. Ethel, hailed as the first lady of the American stage, has a Broadway playhouse named after her.

Which deadly 1849 New York street battle grew out of a feud between two rival Shakespearean actors?

Astor Place Riot crowds backed the American star Edwin Forrest against the visiting Englishman William Macready. Soldiers guarding the opera house ended up firing into them at point-blank range.

Which father of American method acting played the gangster Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II?

Lee Strasberg took the part at the suggestion of his former student Al Pacino and earned an Oscar nomination for it. He had been director of New York's Actors Studio since 1951.

Which good-luck wish do Australian theatre casts exchange before a show, in place of 'break a leg'?

Chookas is said to come from 'chook', Australian slang for chicken. By one oral tradition, a full house meant the company could afford a chicken dinner, and a thin one meant bread.

Which 18th-century actor and pupil of Samuel Johnson swapped bombast for realism and lies in Poets' Corner?

David Garrick managed one of Europe's leading theatres for 29 years. His old teacher remarked that the profession had made him rich and he had made the profession respectable.

Which Vicenza theatre, Andrea Palladio's final design, has kept the same street-scene stage set since 1585?

Teatro Olimpico opened with scenery by Vincenzo Scamozzi that fakes long streets running to a distant horizon, and it was never taken down. It is the oldest surviving stage set in existence.

Which Regency stage clown was so dominant that clowns still take a nickname from him and copy his whiteface make-up?

Joseph Grimaldi is why a clown is still called a 'Joey'. He held residencies at Sadler's Wells and Covent Garden at the same time, and retired in 1823 with his health wrecked by injuries from years of energetic clowning.

Which American actor starred in the 'hundred nights Hamlet' and later founded the Players club in New York?

Edwin Booth shared a stage with both his actor brothers only once, in a benefit Julius Caesar in 1864, months before the youngest, John Wilkes, shot Abraham Lincoln. His long Hamlet run began straight afterwards.