Pantomime Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
8correct to beat the crowd
97 free Pantomime trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 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 97 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 at least 1806, when Samuel Simmons took such a part in London, and the joke depends on it: the audience is meant to see the man under the frock.
Q 03Who traditionally plays the pantomime principal boy, the hero of the story?
A young woman
A young woman played the hero as an accepted convention by the late 19th century, when music hall stars such as Vesta Tilley and Marie Lloyd took the part; Peter Pan's first Peter, in 1904, was Nina Boucicault.
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 the grandest Victorian productions at Drury Lane then ran from Christmas to Easter.
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 the name of Grimaldi's own Clown, whose white face and red cheek triangles clowns still copy; he so dominated the part that later Clowns were all called Joey.
Q 08Which dame, Aladdin's washerwoman mother, takes her name from an inferior grade of green tea?
Widow Twankey
Widow Twankey was christened in 1861 by H. J. Byron after Twankay tea, an 'old, ragged' leaf, 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 is named for the gilt buttons on a pageboy's jacket, and the part goes back to Pedro, a servant Grimaldi played in an 1804 Drury Lane Cinderella.
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 does pantomime add to the story of Dick Whittington?
King Rat
King Rat gives Dick's cat a worthy enemy: in the tale the cat, traditionally called Tommy, rids Morocco of its rats and earns Dick half the Sultan's wealth.
Q 12What name, fixed in 1813, does the Aladdin pantomime give its villainous sorcerer, Aladdin's false uncle?
Abanazar
Abanazar got his name in an 1813 London production; the Arabian Nights never named the sorcerer, and the first stage Aladdin of 1788 billed him simply as 'The African Magician'.
Q 13What is the giant's henchman, the kidnapper of Jack's princess, traditionally called in Jack and the Beanstalk pantos?
Fleshcreep
Q 21Which 'Druriolanus', manager of Drury Lane, started pantomime's tradition of celebrity guest stars?
Augustus Harris
Augustus Harris was knighted in 1891 not for his theatre but, as a sheriff of London, for his part in the German Emperor's state visit; his pantomime recruits from the music halls included Marie Lloyd and Vesta Tilley.
Q 22Which pantomime, rewritten for Drury Lane in 1902, centres on a poor but happy dame tempted with wealth by the Devil?
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 23What is the messy pantomime routine called, usually a baking or decorating job that ends in flying gunge?
Fleshcreep does the dirty work because a stage giant can barely move: Blunderbore is often an actor on stilts or a huge mechanical figure, so his nimbler toady carries out his bidding.
Q 14Which 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 15Pantomime's Cinderella borrows from Rossini's opera but keeps which character the opera swapped for a philosopher?
The Fairy Godmother
The Fairy Godmother has no part in Rossini's opera, which drops the magic and hands her work to the prince's old tutor; pantomime took the opera's Baron and valet but kept the fairy.
Q 16Which Caribbean nation's National Pantomime, begun in 1941, counted Louise Bennett among its first players?
Jamaica
Jamaica's National Pantomime was founded by the educators Henry and Greta Fowler and drew on Jamaican folklore and history in place of English fairy tales; its players have included Rita Marley and the opera singer Willard White.
Q 17Which theatre did John Rich, the silent Harlequin 'Lun', build in 1732?
Covent Garden
Covent Garden opened in 1732; accounts credit the money to Rich's magical pantomimes or to The Beggar's Opera, the 1728 hit said to have 'made Gay rich and Rich gay'.
Q 18From 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 the Roman original was the opposite of a noisy British panto: one silent masked dancer miming myths while a singer or chorus supplied the words.
Q 19The pantomime horse descends from an 1880s donkey act named after which tightrope walker?
Charles Blondin
Charles Blondin, who crossed Niagara Falls on a rope, lent his name to the Blondin Donkey, a two-man costume that the acrobatic Griffiths brothers made a favourite of the music halls.
Q 20Which Drury Lane dame of the 1890s was dubbed 'the King's Jester' after a 1901 command performance at Sandringham?
Dan Leno
Dan Leno began as a clog dancer, winning a world championship belt in Leeds in 1880; two years after entertaining the King he suffered a mental breakdown, and he died at 43.
Slosh scene
The slosh scene is knockabout of the kind that once filled a separate harlequinade, before that comedy was folded into the story itself.
Q 24Which 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 25In 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 26Pantaloon, the harlequinade's miserly father, descends from Pantalone, a greedy merchant of which Italian city?
Venice
Venice's Pantalone was familiar enough to Londoners for Shakespeare to cite 'the lean and slippered pantaloon' as the very type of an old man in As You Like It.
Q 27Which 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.
Q 28Which Baywatch star took over from Ruby Wax as Genie of the Lamp in Aladdin at Wimbledon in 2009?
Pamela Anderson
Pamela Anderson's genie was one of a relay: Anita Dobson of EastEnders and Paul O'Grady were also booked for the same role in the same run at the New Wimbledon Theatre.
Q 29Which Happy Days star played Captain Hook in pantomime from 2006, at Wimbledon, Woking, Milton Keynes and Liverpool?
Henry Winkler
Henry Winkler was followed onto the Wimbledon plank by David Hasselhoff, whose Hook of 2010 was billed as 'Hoff the Hook' and returned at the Manchester Opera House in 2012.
Q 30Which Hollywood veteran made his pantomime debut as Baron Hardup in Cinderella in Sunderland in 2007?
Mickey Rooney
Mickey Rooney was 87 and among the last surviving stars of the silent-film era; he reprised the Baron at Bristol Hippodrome in 2008 and Milton Keynes in 2009.