Ten things you never knew about... The theatre

1. When the playwright Ben Jonson killed an actor in 1598, he escaped the death penalty through Benefit of Clergy – a loophole used by anyone who could read. 2. Marie-Augustin, Marquis de

Pelier, spent 50 years in jail for whistling at Marie Antoinette in a theatre in 1786. 3. The play that Abraham Lincoln was watching at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC when he was

assassinated in 1865 was Our American Cousin by Tom Taylor. 4. Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet contains the first-recorded use of the word ‘bump’. 5. The word ‘robot’ was introduced by

the Czech playwright Karel Capek in 1920 in his play R.U.R. – Rossum’s Universal Robots. 6. “It is a hopeless endeavour to attract people to a theatre unless they can be first brought to

believe that they will never get in.” – Charles Dickens 7. Much Ado About Nothing is the only Shakespeare play that mentions the month of February. 8. The 6,200-seater Radio City Music Hall

in New York claims to be the world’s largest theatre. 9. The word ‘theatre’ originally meant ‘viewing place’. 10. An operating theatre was primarily a place where medical students could

watch surgery being performed. Today is World Theatre Day, held under the auspices of the International Theatre Institute. Details can be found at www.iti-worldwide.org