Meaning
The room in a theatre, concert hall or television studio where performers wait when not on stage or on air; a backstage lounge for cast, guests and crew. In figurative use it serves mainly as shorthand for the private, informal world that sits behind a polished public performance, and it is now often written as the single word 'greenroom'. Neutral technical theatre term, widely understood by the general public; the solid form 'greenroom' is increasingly standard in broadcasting. Regional use: General English (theatrical origin).
Origin
The green room is the actors' waiting room, and the term is old. Samuel Pepys recorded visiting such a room at a theatre in 1667, calling it the 'scene room', an identification made by the theatre historian William J. Lawrence; the 'green room' itself first appears in Thomas Shadwell's comedy A True Widow, performed at Dorset Garden Theatre, London, in December 1678 and printed in 1679, and again in Colley Cibber's Love Makes a Man (1701). The two names ran in parallel for a time, and the origin of the colour word is genuinely unsettled. Competing theories include rooms actually painted or carpeted in green (the Cockpit-in-Court gained a dressing room laid with green baize in 1662), green as eye-relief from stage glare, 'the green' as the stage itself in medieval theatre-in-the-round, a corruption of 'scene room', nervous complexions or uncured makeup, and Max Wall's rhyming-slang fancy. The limelight theory is demonstrably wrong, since limelight was invented around 1820, far too late, and candle or gas lighting makes the glare theory anachronistic. Both World Wide Words and Wikipedia conclude that the origins are obscure; no theory is established.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- green-room
- greenroom
Usage Examples
- Back in the green room, the two rivals made stiff small talk minutes before going on air.
- The documentary captures the panic in the green room that the polished broadcast never showed.
- She waited in the green room with a dozen other candidates while the panel argued next door.