Theatrical superstitions

Actors tend to be a very superstitious lot. This could have much to do with the narrow line they tread between success and disaster when it comes to giving a performance on stage. A forgotten line, a missed cue, or falling over the furniture, could translate a potential triumph into terrible reviews and lost audiences, not to mention the potential for injury or worse if a swordfight or similar action does not go as planned.

That play about some king from north of the border

Most people know that actors have a special horror of quoting William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”, or even mentioning it by name, anywhere within a theatre, and some extend that ban to the outside world. The play is therefore referred to as “the Scottish play”. The reason for this ban is not obvious, although all that stage witchcraft might be thought to cast bad omens on the play. Some quite nasty injuries have also been recorded during fight scenes that have gone wrong, although there are many other plays of which the same is true.

Break a leg

Another well-known superstition beloved of actors is that you never wish someone “good luck” because the opposite is bound to come true. Instead, the wish is expressed as “break a leg” – again in the expectation that no such calamity will befall anyone.

Or at least, that is what is generally believed. However, there are other possible derivations of this custom. One is that the stage curtain is sometimes referred to as the “leg”, and the mechanism for raising and lowering it might break if the performance was so well received that a large number of curtain calls was called for at the end of the show!

Another possibility, also related to curtain calls, is that one’s leg needs to bend when taking a bow, so “breaking” it (in the sense that a shotgun is broken when bent to reload it) would be regarded as a good thing.

It has also been suggested that the reference is to the actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) who continued her acting career after her right leg was amputated in 1915 following a stage accident in 1905 (gangrene had set in) and she often refused to wear an artificial one.

A less likely suggestion is that the custom refers to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln while he and his wife were at the theatre. The assassin, John Wilkes Booth, broke his leg as he leapt from the theatre box on to the stage. However, the connection between this circumstance and wishing actors good luck is hard to see.

Some other superstitions

Moving on, there is a somewhat annoying tradition, at least from the perspective of a theatrical director, that a good final dress rehearsal is a premonition of a terrible opening night, and vice versa. Far too many members of amateur dramatic societies have used this as an excuse for cheerfully getting it wrong at rehearsal and then airing the view that “it’ll be all right on the night” – an optimistic conviction that is often found to be misplaced!

Whistling or clapping backstage is definitely frowned upon, although there used to be a good reason for this taboo in that the cues that stage crew members used for moving scenery and props were, in the days before radio communication, whistles and claps. If someone whistled or clapped at the wrong time the result could be disastrous.

All theatres traditionally had a cat on the premises, for the purpose of keeping vermin at bay – a rope gnawed by a rat was an accident waiting to happen. It therefore became a good luck charm for an actor to see the cat at the stage door as he or she arrived at the theatre. Knowing that the cat was on duty was clearly going to put him or her in a good frame of mind!

Individual actors are known to acquire all sorts of superstitions in terms of how they prepare for their performance, and theatre managers need to be aware of their particular peccadillos when it comes to preparing their changing rooms. An actor who is out of sorts because his changing room is at one end of the corridor instead of the other, or if there is a broken light bulb on his mirror, is not good news when a perfect performance is called for.

Theatres are superstitious places – often with good reason, but by no means always!

© John Welford