Prompter (theatre)

[1][2][3] The role of the souffleur, or prompter, reaches back to the medieval theater,[4] but has disappeared in countries like Britain, the United States, France, and Italy.

This is because multiple plays are performed in rotation each week, making it challenging for actors to memorize all their lines.

[5] In theatres without prompters, their role is undertaken by the stage manager, who will have a copy of the script called the prompt book.

[1] This is the most definitive version of the script for any one performance, and will contain details of all cues, with their precise timings with respect to the action on stage.

In some professional and high-quality community theatre productions, the prompt is never used during a performance to instruct actors if they forget a line or movement, only during a rehearsal.

A prompter with his script, 1936
A 19th-century prompter at work.
The prompt book from an 1874 staging of Hamlet by English actor and manager Henry Irving (1838–1905), in which he experimented with using limelight (white-hot calcium oxide) to represent the ghost of Hamlet’s father .