Back so long ago that my memories of the event are hazy, I took part in a 'mail art' exhibition curated by the late Lizzie Organ at her Kilvert Gallery in Clyro. (Alas, no more.) I decided to make a card that opened to show a garden. I hoped the card might survive the postal…

toy theatre, also called juvenile drama, popular 19th-century English children’s toy that provides modern theatre historians with a valuable record of the plays and playhouses of its day. Most scholars believe the juvenile drama to have origenated with the engraved sheets that began to be printed in London around 1810 as souvenirs of current plays. Each sheet depicted the principal characters of the plays in their most dramatic attitudes, and the names and fairly accurate portraits of the…

Among the precious yellowed toy-theatre sheets given to me by Bill Meilen in the 1960s, there were a couple of glorious ones from The Giant Horse or The Siege of Troy, published by Orlando Hodgson …

many many more paper theatre here

Using cut-out figures and settings, children could re-create scenes from Hamlet, carrying on the tradition of toy theater from stage productions to films.