A toy theatre maker shown at work in a newsreel from the 1920s.

Here’s a great newsreel from the 1920s about toy theatre explaining how they are made. Toy Theatre (also sometimes called “paper theatre” or “model theatre”) is unknown to many people today, but was extremely popular during the Victorian era, during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Toy theatres were mass produced and sold as printed sheets with images of a proscenium, scenery, sets, props and characters that could be cut out, pasted on to cardboard and used to present a play in your parlor or living room.

The public’s fascination with toy theatre mostly died out with the advent of radio, but now almost a hundred years later there’s been a recent resurgence of interest in it. An excellent source for Toy Theatre news and information is the Penny Plain, Twopence Coloured blog, where I discovered this newsreel.