What is toy theatre?

Toy theatre, known in Europe as paper theatre, seems to have originated in London around 1811, when cut-out sheets of figures were first published by William West as souvenirs of current favourite plays.

The phrase 'a penny plain and twopence coloured' was coined to describe these popular prints, hand-coloured in deep and delicious hues. Children, probably mostly boys in their early teens, began to stage their own miniature productions at home, and wooden theatres were produced for them.

Several eminent Victorian artists, including Richard Doyle, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, fed their imagination on the wonderful and exaggerated stories in mediaeval, oriental or classical styles. Their favourite play was The Miller and his Men, first performed at Covent Garden in 1813, a thriller about robbers in Bohemia, which ends with an exploding windmill. This could be done so realistically at home that often the theatre caught fire.

After the 1840s, toy theatre went downmarket, but survived on the fringes of central London with publishers such as Skelt, Park and Redington. Their prints travelled as far as Edinburgh, where Robert Louis Stevenson bought them from a shop in Leith Walk, and wrote a famous essay about them in 1884.
Benjamin Pollock and H. J. Webb became representatives of the last two remaining toy theatre dynasties in London in the 1930s, and Pollock's name was the one that survived, after Stevenson had written, 'If you love art, folly and the bright eyes of children, speed to Pollock's'.

European toy theatre flourished in Austria, Denmark, France, Germany and Spain, and examples of these theatres, usually larger and more lavish, can be seen at Pollock's Toy Museum. Today there are toy theatre collectors all over the world, and also performers who create new plays. In New York, the group 'Great Small Works' meets regularly in Greenwich Village for evenings of spaghetti and political toy theatre. For information about performances in Britain, see www.puppetguild.org.uk

The following link gives further links to toy theatre businesses and enthusiasts in Britain, Europe and the USA: http://www.kannikskorner.com/toytheater/theaterlink.htm

Among these, we especially recommend http://www.toytheatre.net This site is hosted by Hugo Brown, a descendent of John Kilby Green, who called himself the original inventor of toy theatre, and whose copious productions from 1834 to 1859 were acquired by John Redington, and afterwards by his son-in-law, Benjamin Pollock.

Finally, another entertaining gathering of news and information at
http://pennyplain.blogspot.com