Theatre Trivia
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100 free Theatre trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Theatre has been running for two and a half thousand years and has picked up some strange habits along the way: a tragedy nobody will name aloud inside a playhouse, a lone bulb left burning overnight in an empty auditorium, a sound the crews forbid in the wings. Its history is just as odd, from a playhouse that burned down because of a prop to a playwright who died hours after performing his own comedy and a whodunnit that has been running in London since 1952. These fifty questions cover the whole span: the Greek and Roman beginnings, Shakespeare's Globe and the Elizabethan playhouses, the great playwrights from the French classical era to Broadway's post-war giants, West End and Broadway landmarks, the vocabulary and superstitions of the wings, and the awards, the Tonys and the Oliviers, that crown a season. 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 pub quiz round, a drama-class warm-up or a night out with friends who always keep the programme.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Shakespeare tragedy won't actors name inside a theatre, calling it 'the Scottish play'?
Macbeth
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.
Q 02What is the lone bulb left burning on an empty stage overnight called, a habit some trace to gas-lit theatres?
Ghost light
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.
Q 03Which Agatha Christie whodunnit opened in the West End in 1952 and asks audiences to keep its twist secret?
The Mousetrap
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.
Q 04Which Greek is credited as the first person to act a character on stage rather than speak as himself?
Thespis
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.
Q 05What set the original Globe Theatre's thatched roof ablaze in 1613, during a performance of Henry VIII?
A stage cannon
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.
Q 06Which word for knockabout comedy comes from a two-slat wooden paddle used by commedia dell'arte clowns?
Slapstick
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.
Q 07Broadway's Tony Awards are named after which actress-director, the American Theatre Wing's wartime leader?
Antoinette Perry
Antoinette Perry had died in 1946, and the Wing created the awards the next year in her honour.
Q 08In which Samuel Beckett play, first staged in 1953, do two tramps loiter by a tree for a man who never comes?
Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot reached London in 1955 under director Peter Hall, who admitted he hadn't 'the foggiest idea' what some of it meant.
Q 09Which Japanese theatre form, begun by a female dancer named Okuni, turned all-male after women were banned from it?
Kabuki
Kabuki's female troupes grew so popular that fights broke out among audiences, which led the shogunate to ban women from the stage.
Q 10Which term for public attention comes from a 19th-century stage lamp that heated a cylinder of calcium oxide?
Limelight
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'.
Q 11Which salesman, father of Biff and Happy, is the broken hero of Arthur Miller's 1949 tragedy?
Willy Loman
Willy Loman begs his boss Howard for a job in New York so he can stop travelling, and gets fired instead.
Q 12Which Arthur Miller play dramatises the 1692 Salem witch trials as an allegory for McCarthyism?
The Crucible
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.
Q 13Which Norwegian playwright wrote A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler?
Henrik Ibsen
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.
Q 21Which French actress, famous for playing Hamlet and sleeping in a coffin, had a leg amputated in 1915?
Sarah Bernhardt
Sarah Bernhardt kept performing after the amputation, even for French troops in the First World War, carried in on a palanquin.
Q 22Which Greek theatre at a sanctuary of the healing god Asclepius is rated the ancient world's finest for acoustics?
Epidaurus
Epidaurus owes much of its sound to its stepped seat rows, which one study found damp low-pitched crowd sound while passing actors' voices.
Q 23Which Latin phrase for a contrived plot rescue recalls a crane used on ancient Greek stages?
Deus ex machina
Q 14Which Russian playwright's rule says a rifle shown in act one must be fired by the final act?
Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov was a qualified doctor who called medicine his principal profession, even though it was his writing that paid the bills.
Q 15Which Moscow Art Theatre co-founder devised the 'system' of actor training many equate with the American Method?
Stanislavski
Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko planned the Moscow Art Theatre in a single conversation that ran for more than fifteen hours.
Q 16Which Irish playwright won the 1925 Nobel Prize and then an Academy Award for adapting his own Pygmalion?
Bernard Shaw
Bernard Shaw disliked having his plays turned into musicals, yet after his death in 1950 Pygmalion became My Fair Lady.
Q 17Which mother in The Importance of Being Earnest rejects Jack as a suitor after learning he was found in a handbag?
Lady Bracknell
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.
Q 18Which Paris troupe was created in 1680 when Louis XIV merged the city's rival acting companies?
Comédie-Française
The Comédie-Française's actors were arrested during the Revolution in 1793, and the troupe was only reunited in 1799.
Q 19Which French playwright collapsed on stage in 1673 while playing the hypochondriac Argan in his own final comedy?
Molière
Molière, born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, finished that performance of The Imaginary Invalid despite a violent coughing fit, and died at home the same night.
Q 20Which Victorian actor-manager of London's Lyceum became the first actor to be knighted, in 1895?
Irving
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.
Deus ex machina became a standing reproach against Euripides, whose endings often sent a god down to sort out the plot.
Q 24Which invisible barrier did Denis Diderot describe in 1758, telling actors to act as if the curtain had never risen?
Fourth wall
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.
Q 25What do theatres call the backstage lounge where performers wait before and after going on stage?
Green room
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.
Q 26Which Christmas show casts a man as the dame and a woman as the principal boy, with cries of 'He's behind you!'?
Pantomime
Pantomime took off in the 1720s when John Rich, starring as Harlequin himself, used spectacular stage magic to win audiences from a rival theatre.
Q 27Which ancient Greek footwear pair, a thin shoe and a high boot, symbolises comedy and tragedy alongside the two masks?
Sock and buskin
Sock and buskin were stage footwear, and tragic actors had the buskin's soles made unusually thick so they would seem taller and grander.
Q 28Which Roman general built Rome's first permanent stone theatre in 55 BC, calling it steps added to a temple of Venus?
Pompey
Pompey's theatre complex held the Senate hall where Julius Caesar was murdered before a statue of Pompey, the rival he had defeated.
Q 29Which playwright's Our Town, narrated by a Stage Manager, shows Grover's Corners on a bare stage with almost no props?
Thornton Wilder
Thornton Wilder cut the scenery on purpose, arguing that what matters in life lies in the mind, 'not in things, not in scenery'.
Q 30Which two-part Tony Kushner epic, subtitled 'A Gay Fantasia on National Themes', won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama?
Angels in America
Angels in America puts real-life lawyer Roy Cohn on stage, dying of AIDS while refusing to admit he is gay.