50 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 has run in the West End since 1952, its twist ending kept secret by audiences?

The Mousetrap passed its 30,000th performance in March 2025, by far the longest run of any play in the world. Christie gave the rights to her grandson Mathew Prichard as a birthday present.

Which Greek, credited as the first person to act a character on stage, won Athens' first tragedy contest in 534 BC?

Thespis is the reason actors are still called thespians. Tradition also credits him with inventing touring, carting his costumes, masks and props from city to city in a horse-drawn wagon.

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

A stage cannon misfired and ignited the beams and thatch; by one surviving account the only casualty was a man whose burning breeches were put out with a bottle of ale. A second Globe rose on the site by 1614, with a tile roof.

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

Slapstick is the English name for the Italian batacchio, whose two slats crack loudly on contact while passing on almost no force. Commedia troupes improvised around masked stock characters such as Harlequin.

Broadway's Tony Awards are named after which actress-director, a co-founder of the American Theatre Wing?

Antoinette Perry was known as Tony, and the medallion each winner receives shows the comedy and tragedy masks on a swivel. The first ceremony, in 1947, handed out just 11 awards.

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 was written in French as En attendant Godot, and the English version is Beckett's own translation. Critic Vivian Mercier called it a play in which 'nothing happens, twice'.

Which Japanese theatre form, begun by a female dancer named Okuni, turned all-male after women were banned in 1629?

Kabuki started in 1603 with Izumo no Okuni's troupe of young women performing on a dry riverbed in Kyoto; after the ban, male specialists called onnagata took over the female roles.

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

Limelight came from aiming an oxygen-hydrogen flame at a block of quicklime until it glowed white; Covent Garden first used it indoors in 1837. Engineer Thomas Drummond had built the first working version in 1826 for surveying.

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

Willy Loman is 63 and has given his firm 34 years on the road when it refuses him a desk job; Miller subtitled the play 'Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem'. Its first Broadway run lasted 742 performances.

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

The Crucible won the 1953 Tony Award for Best Play, and three years later Miller was himself subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee after asking not to be made to name names.

Which Norwegian playwright, called 'the father of modern drama', wrote A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler?

Henrik Ibsen was already in his fifties when A Doll's House appeared in 1879, and its heroine Nora walking out on her husband and three children scandalised Europe. His son Sigurd became Norway's prime minister.

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

Anton Chekhov was a practising physician who called medicine his lawful wife and literature his mistress. His 'gun' principle insists that every element of a story must earn its place or be cut.

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

Stanislavski acted only as an amateur until he was 33, when a legendary 18-hour conversation with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko produced the Moscow Art Theatre. He later urged students to shake a character off after rehearsing.

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

Bernard Shaw's 1938 screenplay for Pygmalion won him the Academy Award, and the play's Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle was modelled on Kitty Wilson, who ran a flower stall off the Strand. The play opened in London in 1914.

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

Lady Bracknell's interrogation of Jack is the play's most famous scene, and the role has sometimes been played by men. Oscar Wilde's comedy opened at the St James's Theatre on 14 February 1895, months before his downfall.

Which Paris troupe, created by Louis XIV in 1680, is the oldest active theatre company in the world?

The Comédie-Française was born when Louis XIV merged the only two acting troupes then in Paris, the Guénégaud and the Hôtel de Bourgogne. Its full members are still called sociétaires and earn a pension after 20 years.

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

Molière, born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, had tuberculosis and was seized by a coughing fit and haemorrhage during The Imaginary Invalid; he finished the show and died a few hours later. His Tartuffe had been banned for impiety.

Which Victorian star, whose Lyceum business manager was Bram Stoker, became the first actor to be knighted in 1895?

Henry Irving made the Lyceum London's most important theatre over 23 years with Ellen Terry opposite him, and campaigned for decades for theatre to rank with music and painting as an art. His breakthrough was the melodrama The Bells.

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

Sarah Bernhardt kept a satin-lined coffin in her bedroom and sometimes slept in it or lay in it to learn her roles. Gangrene from a leg injured years earlier in a stage fall in Rio de Janeiro forced the amputation, almost to the hip.

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

Epidaurus seats up to 14,000 and was designed around 340–300 BC by Polykleitos the Younger; drama there formed part of the worship of Asclepius. UNESCO listed it in 1988 together with the god's temple.

Which Latin phrase for a contrived rescue recalls the crane Greek stages used to lower a god into the final scene?

Deus ex machina, 'god from the machine', became an established device with Euripides, who uses one in more than half his surviving tragedies. Aristophanes mocked him by hoisting Euripides himself on stage by the crane.

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

The fourth wall got its English name from Leigh Hunt in 1807, translating Diderot's 'un grand mur'; a play that addresses the audience directly is said to break it. Critic Vincent Canby called it 'that invisible scrim'.

What is the performers' backstage lounge called, a name one story traces to London's Blackfriars Theatre of 1599?

The green room's name is usually put down to such rooms once being painted green, though the true origin is lost. Some English theatres ranked several by an actor's status, with fines for using one above your station.

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

Pantomime grew out of the harlequinade, and the clown Joseph Grimaldi came to dominate London's pantomimes in the early 1800s. Audiences still answer the cast with 'Oh, yes it is!' and 'Oh, no it isn't!'.

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

The sock and buskin belong to the two Muses of drama: Thalia, Muse of comedy, wears the thin-soled sock, while Melpomene, Muse of tragedy, wears the buskin, a boot the Romans called a cothurnus.

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 became the scene of Julius Caesar's assassination in 44 BC, when the Senate was meeting in its curia. Permanent stone theatres had been forbidden in Rome, so Pompey built just outside the sacred boundary.

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

Thornton Wilder called Our Town his favourite of his works and complained it was rarely done right, wanting it played 'simply, dryly, and sincerely'. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; its Stage Manager addresses the audience directly.

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

Angels in America runs to two plays, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, examining AIDS and homosexuality in 1980s America; it also took the Tony for Best Play and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play.

Which Lorraine Hansberry drama, titled from a Langston Hughes poem, was the first Broadway play by a Black woman?

A Raisin in the Sun takes its name from Langston Hughes's poem 'Harlem', which asks what happens to a dream deferred. Producer Philip Rose needed eighteen months to raise the money for a cast deemed a risky investment.

Whose Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was picked by the 1963 Pulitzer jury, only for the board to give no drama prize?

Edward Albee's play had just won the Tony for Best Play when Columbia University's trustees objected to its profanity and sexual themes; jurors John Mason Brown and John Gassner resigned in protest. Albee went on to win three Pulitzers.

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 and fled as a young Jewish refugee; he later won an Academy Award for the screenplay of Shakespeare in Love. Rosencrantz calls heads correctly 92 times in a row.

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

The Minack Theatre grew out of a village group's A Midsummer Night's Dream staged in a nearby meadow in 1929; Cade had bought the land at Minack Point for £100, 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 became the English-speaking world's first state-subsidised theatre in 1925. The Playboy rioters took offence at the word 'shift', a woman's undergarment, and the actors finished the play in dumbshow.

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

Ubu Roi's first word is 'merdre', the French 'merde' with an extra r, and the play got only an invited run-through and a single public performance. Scholars treat it as a precursor of Dada, Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd.

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

A thrust stage connects to the backstage area only at its upstage end, so the audience wraps around the action; every Elizabethan playhouse used one. Modern examples include Minneapolis's Guthrie Theater.

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. Most theatres built after 1900 flattened the stage and raked the seating instead.

Which backstage habit is taboo because early stage crews, recruited from ships, used it to cue scenery changes?

Whistling could make riggers fly a backdrop in or out at the wrong moment, with deadly results, because sailors hired from port had brought their coded whistles into the theatre. Stage rigging still descends from sailing rigging.

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 has kept; Rostand's swordsman-poet has a famously enormous nose that makes him doubt himself. The play opened in Paris on 27 December 1897.

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

Noises Off takes its title from the stage direction for sounds made offstage, and each of its three acts contains a performance of the first act of Nothing On. The printed programme even carries spoof adverts for sardines.

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

Equus was inspired by a real crime in which a 17-year-old blinded 26 horses in northern England; the 2007 Gielgud Theatre revival made headlines because Radcliffe, then 17, had to appear nude. It first ran at the National Theatre in 1973.

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

Look Back in Anger opened at London's Royal Court Theatre in 1956 and turned Osborne from a struggling writer into a wealthy celebrity; its harsh realism was a rebuke to the escapist theatre of the previous generation.

Which Chicago playhouse's 1903 fire killed 602 people and led to panic bars and doors that open outward?

The Iroquois Theatre was billed as 'absolutely fireproof' and had opened only a month earlier; many of the 1,700 people inside found exits locked or hidden. It stayed the nation's deadliest single-building disaster for nearly a century.

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 trade could shade into extortion: writers and singers were contacted before a debut and told to pay up or be booed. Emperor Nero had five thousand soldiers chant his praises when he performed.

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

Fleabag's heroine constantly talks straight to the camera, feeding the audience commentary and internal monologue just as the stage version did. The series won Golden Globes for Best Television Series and for Waller-Bridge as Best Actress.

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

The Bald Soprano holds the record for the longest continuous run in a single theatre; its title came from an actor's rehearsal slip, 'la cantatrice chauve' for 'the blonde schoolteacher'. Ionesco was learning English with Assimil.

Whose Six Characters in Search of an Author drew shouts of 'Manicomio!' (madhouse) at its 1921 Rome premiere?

Luigi Pirandello's metatheatrical play has six unfinished characters interrupt a rehearsal to demand their story be staged, and the Teatro Valle crowd also yelled 'Incommensurabile!', meaning off the scale.

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

Neil Simon was the only living playwright with a New York City theatre named after him; his trilogy Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound drew on his own life. The Alvin had opened in 1927 with the Gershwins' Funny Face.

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's present building opened in 1812; the first, known as the Theatre Royal in Bridges Street, was a three-tiered wooden structure holding about 700 people. Disney's Frozen made its West End debut there.