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50 free Pantomime trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Pantomime is the oddest thing the British do at Christmas: a fairy tale in which the hero is a girl in tights, the hero's mother is a bloke in a frock, and the audience is expected to shout at the stage. It grew out of Italian comedy, a silent dancing Harlequin and a Regency clown so famous that clowns still carry his nickname. These fifty questions cover the whole tradition: the commedia dell'arte and harlequinade roots, the stock roles and their conventions, the classic stories and the villains who get booed, the rituals the audience joins in, the playhouses that built the form, and the film and pop stars who have donned the wig. Every question carries a clue for players who do not know the answer outright, and every explanation adds the fact that makes the answer worth remembering. The first ten are the broadest; the deep cuts come later. It suits a Christmas pub quiz, a drama-club warm-up or the car on the way to the matinee.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What do pantomime audiences shout when a ghost creeps up unseen on the dame and the comic?
He's behind you!
'He's behind you!' is built on the bench gag: the dame and the comic sit singing a cheerful song to forget their fears while a ghost circles behind them, and each spots it and bolts until the dame's face scares the ghost away.
Q 02Who traditionally plays the pantomime dame, the over-the-top matriarch in big hair and heavy make-up?
A man in drag
A man in drag has played the dame since the part took shape in the 19th century, and the costume parade that George Lacy is credited with inventing can now run to twenty-two outfits in a single show.
Q 03Who, by a tradition that grew from laws restricting child actors, plays the pantomime principal boy?
A young woman
A young woman in tights and thigh boots played the hero for over a century, though the thigh-slapping principal boy has all but vanished. Peter Pan borrowed the convention, with Nina Boucicault the first Peter in 1904.
Q 04By a convention from medieval mystery plays, from which side does the pantomime villain enter?
Stage left
Stage left stood for Hell in the medieval mystery plays, so the villain enters there while the good fairy comes in from stage right, the side of Heaven; stage left is the audience's right.
Q 05On which day did Victorian pantomimes customarily open, binding the form to the family Christmas?
Boxing Day
Boxing Day was opening night, and at Drury Lane a Victorian pantomime then ran from Christmas to Easter, with stars heading a cast of more than 40.
Q 06Which word for knockabout comedy began as Harlequin's two-slat wooden bat in commedia dell'arte?
Slapstick
Slapstick was the batacchio, two slats that crack loudly while passing on little force, and in English pantomime Harlequin struck the scenery with it like a wand to trigger magical scene changes.
Q 07Which nickname for a clown honours Grimaldi, the Regency star who made Clown the centre of pantomime?
Joey
Joey was Grimaldi's own name for his Clown, whose white base and red cheek triangles most clowns still copy, and hundreds of clowns in full costume attend a memorial service to him every February at an east London church.
Q 08Which dame, Aladdin's washerwoman mother, takes her name from an inferior grade of Chinese green tea?
Widow Twankey
Widow Twankey was christened in 1861 by H. J. Byron after Twankay tea, an 'old, ragged' leaf named for Tunxi in Anhui, the joke being that the widow, like the tea, is past her best.
Q 09Which of the Baron's servants in Cinderella is the heroine's best friend, pining hopelessly for her?
Buttons
Buttons descends from Pedro, the servant Grimaldi played in an 1804 Drury Lane Cinderella billed as 'A new Grand Allegorical Pantomimic Spectacle', a show far from the modern panto in style.
Q 10What office do the Bow Bells promise Dick Whittington as they call him back from fleeing the city?
Lord Mayor of London
Lord Mayor of London was an office the real Whittington did reach, though he was of high birth and probably never owned a cat; the tale's earliest known chapbook dates only from 1656.
Q 11Which arch-villain, first recorded at the Surrey Theatre in 1877, battles Dick Whittington's cat?
King Rat
King Rat squares off against the Fairy of the Bells, who personifies the London bells that call Dick home; in some versions the cat Tommy sails to Morocco and clears the Sultan's court of rats.
Q 12Where in north London, at a stone topped by a cat statue since 1964, does Dick Whittington hear the bells?
Highgate Hill
Highgate Hill was an 18th-century embellishment: the earliest chapbook, from 1656, has the boy reach only Bunhill, and Highgate lies north, the wrong way for a lad fleeing home towards Gloucester.
Q 13What name, fixed in 1813, does the Aladdin pantomime give its villainous sorcerer, Aladdin's false uncle?
Abanazar
Q 21Which Drury Lane dame of the 1890s was dubbed 'the King's Jester' after a 1901 command performance at Sandringham?
Dan Leno
Dan Leno's ghost is said to haunt Drury Lane, where he earned £200 a pantomime season; in 1880 he had won the world clog-dancing championship in Leeds, taking home a belt weighing 1.26 kg.
Q 22Which 'Druriolanus', manager of Drury Lane, started pantomime's tradition of celebrity guest stars?
Augustus Harris
Augustus Harris was knighted in 1891 not for theatre but for his part in the German Emperor's state visit, and he spent up to £10,000 a show on spectacles that could run five hours.
Q 23Which pantomime, rewritten for Drury Lane in 1902, centres on a poor but happy dame tempted with wealth by the Devil?
Abanazar is the model for Disney's Jafar, and before 1813 the part was billed simply as 'The African Magician', after the original tale's sorcerer from the Maghreb.
Q 14What is the giant's henchman, the kidnapper of Jack's princess, traditionally called in Jack and the Beanstalk pantos?
Fleshcreep
Fleshcreep is the sworn enemy of the fairy who helps Jack, while the giant himself is usually named Blunderbore after a figure from the 18th-century tale Jack the Giant Killer.
Q 15Which Cinderella character, the prince's right-hand man, was borrowed from Rossini's opera La Cenerentola?
Dandini
Dandini reached the pantomime through an 1820 Harlequin and Cinderella that took much of Rossini's plot, and Cinderella's first meeting with the prince comes when she mistakes Dandini for him during a hunt.
Q 16Which pair of Cinderella's tormentors are traditionally played as a double dame act?
The Ugly Sisters
The Ugly Sisters are the dame turned antagonist, a contrast to the warm matriarchs of Jack and the Beanstalk and the nursemaids of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White; Nigel Ellacott and Peter Robbins played the pair in 28 pantos from 1983.
Q 17Which Caribbean nation's National Pantomime, begun in 1941, counted Louise Bennett among its first players?
Jamaica
Jamaica's National Pantomime was founded by the Fowlers, educators of the Little Theatre Movement, and its players have included Rita Marley and the bass Willard White; it still opens the day after Christmas at Kingston's Little Theatre.
Q 18Which theatre did John Rich, the silent Harlequin 'Lun', build in 1732 on the profits of his pantomimes?
Covent Garden
Covent Garden is often said to have been paid for by The Beggar's Opera, the 1728 hit that 'made Gay rich and Rich gay', but that is a misconception; Rich's magical pantomimes were the money-spinner.
Q 19From which language does the word pantomime ultimately come, meaning a dancer who acted 'all' the roles?
Greek
Greek pantomimos joined panto- ('all') to mimos, and Rome's version was a solo male dancer in a long silk tunic miming myths to a libretto sung by a singer or chorus.
Q 20How many actors share a traditional pantomime horse, a costume descended from 1885's Blondin Donkey act?
Two
Two performers make a pantomime horse, the rear one bent double with arms round the front one's waist, and the Blondin Donkey was named after the tightrope walker famed for crossing Niagara Falls.
Mother Goose
Mother Goose's 1902 script by J. Hickory Wood became 'the ancestor of all the pantomimes of that title', and its 1806 original at a rival house gave Grimaldi's Clown the hit that eclipsed Harlequin.
Q 24What is the messy pantomime routine called, usually a baking or decorating job that ends in flying gunge?
Slosh scene
The slosh scene is the surviving trace of the harlequinade that once closed every pantomime; since the 20th century its knockabout has been folded into the main body of the show.
Q 25Which Fairy Queen-led set change once turned the pantomime's cast into the characters of the harlequinade?
Transformation scene
The transformation scene survives only in Cinderella, where the pumpkin coach is often drawn by real Shetland ponies; in the earliest pantomimes it was Harlequin's own magic that changed the settings.
Q 26In the harlequinade, which daughter or ward of Pantaloon elopes with Harlequin as her father gives chase?
Columbine
Columbine wore the cap and apron of a serving girl, and the chase after her and Harlequin kept essentially the same plot for more than 150 years, gaining only a bumbling policeman.
Q 27Pantaloon, the harlequinade's miserly father, descends from Pantalone, a greedy merchant of which Italian city?
Venice
Venice's Pantalone, in red tight-fitting vest and breeches, was familiar enough to Londoners for Shakespeare to cite 'the lean and slippered Pantaloon' as the very type of an old man around 1600.
Q 28In which year did London's Lyceum Theatre stage the last harlequinade, by then a brief acrobatic epilogue?
1939
1939 ended a chase that had lost its audience by the 1880s, when music hall and comic opera crowded it out and the lovers' scenes dwindled to brief displays of dancing and acrobatics.
Q 29Which nursery-rhyme pantomime ran at least 943 performances at New York's Olympic Theatre from 1868, a record run?
Humpty Dumpty
Humpty Dumpty was the vehicle of the American clown G. L. Fox, who toured it across North America, and one source puts the New York run at 1,200 performances by its close in 1873.
Q 30Which knighted Shakespearean actor donned a frock to play Aladdin's mother at the Old Vic in 2004?
Ian McKellen
Ian McKellen 'lets down his hair and lifts up his skirt to reveal a nifty pair of legs', wrote the critic Michael Billington, and in 2025 he was back in panto as a video cameo playing the dog Toto at the Pleasance, Islington.