Anyone Can Die / Theatre

As a Death Trope, contains many spoilers. Tread with care.

Times where Anyone Can Die in Theatre.

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• In The Insect Play, several insects meet untimely demises, not counting the ant war of the third act which ends in a general massacre. In the epilogue, the Audience Surrogate sees the moths happily dying one by one, and then finds that it's his turn to die.
• Even the Narrator in Into the Woods.
• Many of the tragedies of William Shakespeare:
  • Macbeth has Macbeth himself kick the bucket many years earlier than the real Macbeth did historically. For Elizabethan audiences, this would be like a 21st century person watching a movie where Abraham Lincoln dies before the American Civil War even began.
  • Othello contains death both by murder and by suicide.
  • Romeo and Juliet is about a deadly feud between two families, which of course means that nobody is safe. The very beginning of the play spoils the coming deaths of Romeo and Juliet, but they're far from the only ones who buy the farm.
  • Hamlet is legendary for this, being the go-to example for "Everybody Dies" Ending comparisons.
  • Titus Andronicus has the largest number of deaths in any Shakespeare tragedy — fourteen humans and one fly.
• In 'Tis Pity She's a Whore nobody goes safe. That's partly because the cast features several would-be murderers, and partly because only some of them manage to avoid accidentally murdering the wrong person by pure incompetence.
• Westeros: An American Musical is faithful to the death toll of A Song of Ice and Fire, resulting in quite a few characters dying in the play:
  • "Plot development": Robert.
  • Ned Stark dies between the end of "Plot development" and the beginning of "Stannis Refuted".
  • "Crownless": Renly.
  • "Hisstorically Inaccurate": The raven serving as narrator for Act I.
  • "Stark to Finish": Robb and Catelyn.
  • "The Groom When It Happened": Joffrey and Dontos.
  • "Talk Less, Stab More": Oberyn.
  • Shae and Tywin little after the end of "Congratshaelations".

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