Case Seven
Case 7: International and Later Toy Theatres
47. William Barnes Rhodes. Bombastes Furioso: A Burlesque Tragic Opera in One Act. London: H. G. Clarke and Co. 1880?
As the market for toy theatres grew, printing technology advanced and printing became cheaper. Theatrical sheets were inserted in boys’ magazines as giveaways, and complete plays with text were sold for one penny each. This ‘penny packet’ is illustrated with woodcuts and includes all the characters on a single folded sheet. Paper working models and shadow puppets were also produced in this cheap format.
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48. Jack Butler Yeats. James Flaunty, or The Terror of the Western Seas. London: Elkin Mathews, 1901.
Later admirers of the toy theatre such Jack B. Yeats, painter and brother of poet William Butler Yeats, attempted an artistic revival of the genre by writing and illustrating three new original plays for the miniature theatre.
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49. Hans Christian Anderson. The Tinder Box. Copenhagen: Alfred Jacobsen, 1915.
Hans Christian Anderson played with toy theatres as a child, likely custom made just for him. Danish bookshops first imported German toy theatre sheets, but by the 1870s were publishing their own plays.
Lithographer Alfred Jacobsen was one of the most popular publishers of the Danish paper theatre or dukketeater, publishing over fifty plays before his death. This is the story of a soldier, a witch, and the magic tinderbox with which they summon three formidable dogs to do their bidding.
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50. William Shakespeare. Hamlet, Produced and Directed by Laurence Olivier. London: Benjamin Pollock Limited, 1948.
This souvenir toy theatre adaptation was produced the same year as the premier of Laurence Olivier’s film version of Hamlet. It uses tinted stills of the actors from the film as its characters, and is sized to fit Pollock’s Regency theatre.
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51. Sancho Panza Gobernador. Barcelona: C. B. Nualart, 1930.
El teatro de los niños differed from the English toy theatre in that theatres often had three dimensional or molded architectural fronts and no stage floor. Characters came with an extra piece of card below their feet to allow for operation. The scenes produced in the Spanish toy theatre often used coloured tissue paper, illuminated from behind to create lighting effects, and the themes of the plays tended to be more adult in nature than their international counterparts.
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52. Characters and scenes from the Austrian toy theatre. Vienna: M. Trentsensky, various dates.
Matthias Trentsensky was the most important toy theatre publisher in Austria during the nineteenth century. From his lithographic printing house in Vienna, he published forty-one plays for the large toy theatre and sixteen for the small, mostly based on Austrian tales, operas, and Shakespeare.
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53. Edward Gorey. Dracula: A Toy Theatre: The Sets and Costumes of the Broadway Production of the Play. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979.
Author and illustrator Edward Gorey designed the sets, costumes, posters, playbills, and merchandise for the 1973 revival of the 1924 stage adaptation of Dracula, winning a Tony Award for his costume design. He published the sets and characters in toy theatre format several years later.
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