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50 free Theatre trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 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 has run in the West End since 1952, its twist ending kept secret by audiences?
The Mousetrap
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.
Q 04Which Greek, credited as the first person to act a character on stage, won Athens' first tragedy contest in 534 BC?
Thespis
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.
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 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.
Q 06Which word for knockabout comedy comes from a two-slat wooden paddle used by commedia dell'arte clowns?
Slapstick
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.
Q 07Broadway's Tony Awards are named after which actress-director, a co-founder of the American Theatre Wing?
Antoinette Perry
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.
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 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'.
Q 09Which Japanese theatre form, begun by a female dancer named Okuni, turned all-male after women were banned in 1629?
Kabuki
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.
Q 10Which term for public attention comes from a 19th-century stage lamp that heated a cylinder of calcium oxide?
Limelight
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.
Q 11Which salesman, father of Biff and Happy, is the broken hero of Arthur Miller's 1949 tragedy?
Willy Loman
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.
Q 12Which Arthur Miller play dramatises the 1692 Salem witch trials as an allegory for McCarthyism?
The Crucible
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.
Q 13Which Norwegian playwright, called 'the father of modern drama', wrote A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler?
Q 21Which French actress, famous for playing Hamlet and sleeping in a coffin, had a leg amputated in 1915?
Sarah Bernhardt
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.
Q 22Which Greek theatre at a sanctuary of the healing god Asclepius is rated the ancient world's finest for acoustics?
Epidaurus
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.
Q 23Which Latin phrase for a contrived rescue recalls the crane Greek stages used to lower a god into the final scene?
Henrik Ibsen
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.
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 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.
Q 15Which Moscow Art Theatre co-founder devised the 'system' of actor training many equate with the American Method?
Stanislavski
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.
Q 16Which Irish playwright won the 1925 Nobel Prize and then an Academy Award for adapting his own Pygmalion?
Bernard Shaw
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.
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 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.
Q 18Which Paris troupe, created by Louis XIV in 1680, is the oldest active theatre company in the world?
Comédie-Française
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.
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, 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.
Q 20Which Victorian star, whose Lyceum business manager was Bram Stoker, became the first actor to be knighted in 1895?
Irving
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.
Deus ex machina
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.
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 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'.
Q 25What is the performers' backstage lounge called, a name one story traces to London's Blackfriars Theatre of 1599?
Green room
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.
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 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!'.
Q 27Which ancient Greek footwear pair, a thin shoe and a high boot, symbolises comedy and tragedy alongside the two masks?
Sock and buskin
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.