Toy theater

The original toy theatres were mass-produced replicas of popular plays, sold as kits that people assembled at home, including stage, scenery, characters and costumes. They were printed on paperboard, available at English playhouses and commercial libraries for "a penny plain or two pence coloured." Hobbyists often went to great pains to not only hand-colour their stages but to embellish their toy theatre personae with bits of cloth and tinsel; tinsel print characters could be bought pre-tinselled, or a wide range of supplies for home tinselling could be bought. Just as the toy-sized stages diminished a play’s scale, their corresponding scripts tended to abridge the text, paring it down to key characters and lines for a shorter, less complicated presentation.

In the first half of the 19th century, more than 300 of London’s most popular plays saw the issue as toy theatres. Publishers sent artists to the playhouses of Georgian and early-Victorian London to record the scenery, costumes and dramatic attitudes of the greatest successes of the day. The theatre management often provided these artists with a free seat, as the toy theatre sheets were excellent free advertising.

Stage theater of the early 19th century had been based more on spectacle than on depth of plot or character, and these characteristics lent themselves effectively to the format of toy theater. Toward the end of the 19th century, European popular drama had shifted its preference to the trend of Realism, marking a dramaturgical swing toward psychological complexity, character motivation and settings utilizing ordinary three-dimensional scenic elements. This trend in stage theater did not make an easy conversion to its toy counterpart, and with the fanciful dramas of 50 years prior being out of fashion, the toy theaters that remained in print fell into obsolescence.

Despite its fall in popularity, toy theater remained in the realm of influential artists who championed its resurgence. In 1884 British author Robert Louis Stevenson wrote an essay in tribute of toy theater’s tiny grandeur entitled “Penny Plain, Twopence Coloured” in which he extolled the virtues of the dramas supplied by Pollock's.[2][3] Other children’s authors like Lewis Carroll and Hans Christian Andersen also dabbled in toy theater, as did Oscar Wilde. The brothers Jack and William Butler Yeats both used toy theaters as mock-ups for their work in art and stagecraft. In the 20th century toy theater became a tool for the avant-garde, messed with by Futurist founder F.T. Marienetti as well as Pablo Picasso. Film directors like Ingmar Bergman and Orson Welles would use toy theaters as staging grounds for their cinematic masterpieces, and Laurence Olivier even made a toy theater of his film version of Hamlet, mass-produced with a little paper cutout of himself in the starring role. But after its second wave boom, toy theater fell into a second recession, replaced in the 1950s, by a different box in people’s sitting rooms that needed no live operator and whose sets, characters, stories and musical numbers were beamed in electronically from miles away to be projected on the glass of a cathode ray tube: television.

Ainé Adriana Martelli performing Gení y el Zepelin at the Museo de Arte Popular in Mexico City

Toy theater has been enjoying a revival in recent decades. Collectors and traditionalists perform restored versions of Victorian plays while experimental puppeteers push the form’s limits, adapting the works of Isaac Babel and Italo Calvino, as well as that of unsung storytellers, friends, neighbors, relatives, and themselves. Contemporary toy theater may utilize any available technology and cover any subject, and numerous international toy theater festivals occur regularly throughout the Americas and Europe, attracting many well-known actors, musicians and authors to their stages.