PeoplePlay UK - Make your own toy theatre

Make your own toy theatre

Recreate your own toy theatre production of the pantomime Cinderella. Follow the instructions on how to download and assemble your theatre which comes complete with characters, scenery and an original toy theatre script.

Toy theatres were hugely popular in the 19th Century, and were collected by adults and children. Every successful production staged in London’s West End theatres would be reproduced in miniature. The first ‘juvenile drama’ as toy theatres were known, were just printed sheets showing the principal characters in the play, but as the trend grew, publishers brought out model theatres for their cut-out characters to act on, and copies of scenery. Cut down versions of the play texts were also produced so that people had a script to follow at home.

Find out about Toy Theatres

Example Characters

Example Theatre

Photo of an almost finished theatre
This is a completed theatre, seen with partially coloured stage front.

What to do

1. To download the Toy Theatre click on either of the download links (). Your computer will then ask whether you want to save the file (if it doesn’t, click on the ‘download’ link with your right mouse button and choose the ‘Save target as…’ or ‘Save link as…’ option).

2. Once you press ‘save’ your computer will ask you where to download the file to. Select a location that you will remember, perhaps the desktop or your ‘documents’ folder.

3. After the download has finished, which may take several minutes if you are using a modem, you will need to 'unzip' the file (because the file has been compressed, or ‘zipped’ to make the download faster). New versions of Windows will do this automatically for you. If it does not, then you will need to download a program to unzip the file, such as WinZip, which is free and available at www.winzip.com

4. Once the files are unzipped you can view the instructions (by opening the document 'Instructions.pdf') and begin to create your own toy theatre. If you do not have PDF viewer software installed on your computer you can download a free version from www.adobe.com

PDF version
toytheatre_pdf.zip
(3.4 meg)

HTML version
toytheatre_html.zip
(3.2 meg)