Popovy Sisters: Dolls by Hand

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Coming in July: The Smallest Show on Earth!

Coming up next month in July: The Geisel Library's annual Paper Theatre Festival, aka

..."the Smallest Show on Earth"!

Every year, the UC San Diego Library hosts a Paper Theatre Festival, celebrating an art form with roots in Victorian Era Europe. Paper theatres, also known as toy theatres, were used to promote productions. They were printed on paperboard sheets and sold as kits at the concession stand of an opera house, playhouse, or vaudeville theater. The kits were then assembled at home and plays were performed for family members and guests, sometimes with live musical accompaniment. The theaters gradually declined in popularity during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but have enjoyed a resurgence in interest in recent years among many puppeteers, filmmakers, theater historians, and hobbyists. Presently, there are numerous international paper theater festivals throughout the Americas and Europe, as well as several museums.

Watch this short documentary celebrating paper theatre filmed by UCSD-TV for the Library’s Channel!

Enchanted Dolls

I love making dolls because it allows me to work with several mediums at once. Making dolls is a creative process that combines the disciplines of industrial design, sculpting, ceramics, painting, engineering, drawing, engraving, jewelry making and textiles. It generates a whole that is greater and richer than the sum of each comprising medium put together. 

- Marina Bychkova

Rebel Red & The Wolf

Red encounters the Wolf

Joe Gladwin

Presents

REBEL RED & THE WOLF

Sunday, January 8, 2017
[See Details by clicking on poster on the right]

Rebel Red lives with her mum Penny and her dad Will  in the a sleepy country village. Penny runs the community shop, Will is the forest ranger. Family life is disrupted when Granny Bake-Off’s herbal medicines get mixed up, and Grandpa Jack spots a huge wolf near their home...

This is a family show adapted by Joe Gladwin from the traditional LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD story

Help arrives in the nick of time!

Pollock's Toy Museum & Eddy Fawdry

Awhile back a profile was done of the museum, by none other than Professor Ronald Hutton, which is lovely indeed for those of us halfway around the world who may never get to visit there in person. It is, in a limited sense, a virtual tour. Enjoy this clip from the program that featured the Pollock's Toy Museum...



Reviews:

Eddy Fawdry (and his wee dog Haggis) preside over this strange secret world of vintage toys, which he inherited from his grandparents and they from the Hoxton-based Pollock family, which made famous toy theaters. In room after creaky room, history stares back at you with doll’s eyes: puppets, Gollywogs, the 1921 forerunner to G.I. Joe (Swiss Action Man), doll’s houses, mechanical cast-iron banks, 1950s rocket toys, a board game based on the Falkland Islands invasion that was banned for being in poor taste. Stories are everywhere and the kitsch factor is through the roof, which brings us to the quirky, spirited building, which has been left leaning and unrestored since its erection in the 1780s (but received a new roof after the Luftwaffe blew off the original one). The ground-floor shop stocks unusual, hard-to-find toys that don’t cost much, including handmade items and cardboard theaters—the original inspiration for this one-of-a-kind time warp.

- Jason Cochran (Frommer's)

Pollock's Toy Museum: A Magical Mystery Tour

Do not be fooled, this beautiful house and its neighbour have more to pose than this dancing jester. If you approach, do so with caution. The sheer unimaginable excellence of this rare collection of exhibited, ingenious and engaging articles, lost in time, is undoubtedly a worthy and untamed match for J.K.Rowling’s ‘Diagon Alley’.

Take a magical mystery tour with Eddy Fawdry, of Pollock's Toy Museum¹ - a place like no other, in the world...

¹ - Children lured by the colourful shop window of Pollocks Toy Museum to explore inside, whether at 44 Monmouth Street, in Covent Garden, central London, or, after 1969, at 1 Scala Street, were likely to meet the museum's founder, Marguerite Fawdry, and to be drawn by her, with a delicious sense of complicity, into the arcane world of Victorian melodramas performed with cardboard figures three inches high.

If they visited with any regularity they might find themselves put to work in the basement collating sets of plays from packets of printed sheets unopened since the 1890s, with a paper bag of special treasures to take home at the end of the day. This eccentric private museum with its associated shop selling model theatres and unusual toys has been an enduring feature of the West End since the 1950s. It was a pioneering venture in conservation, taste and way of life.

She was born Marguerite Desnieres in 1912, the daughter of a Breton father killed two years later in defence of his country and an English mother, and was educated at the Lycee in South Kensington, west London, and at the University of Lille. In 1935 she joined the theatre studio of Michel St Denis but worked in journalism before the Second World War took her into the French Section of the BBC and the Press Office of General de Gaulle.

In 1942 she married Kenneth Fawdry, a schoolmaster, whom she had first met on a train from Florence to Rome. They shared radical politics, unconventional attitudes and a strong sense of missionary purpose. Their son John was born during the war and in 1951 Marguerite left the BBC, which Kenneth had by then joined, to write scripts for language-teaching broadcasts. It was into this fertile seedbed of education, parenthood and the stage that the germ of toy theatre fell almost by accident in 1952.

Benjamin Pollock of Hoxton, whose name is commemorated in the museum, died in 1937. In 1944 his stock of copperplates and lithographic prints for traditional English toy theatre, dating back to the 1830s, was acquired from his daughters by Alan Keen, a bookseller who revived the business with more flair than the post-war austerity years could support.

Click above to see inside Pollock's Toy Museum...

The Fawdrys, enthusiasts for many kind of popular arts including the naive paintings of Mr Bucket of Battersea, had been among his customers, but Marguerite was dismayed to discover that the business had gone into receivership in 1954, when she wanted some of the wire slides (twopence each) for pushing the tiny figures on to the stage. The accountant whom she traced gave a provocative response, "I believe there are hundreds of thousands in the warehouse, madam, but there's no one who could look them out for you. Of course, you could, I suppose, buy the whole lot if you wanted them."

This is what she did, with help from Kenneth's father, and started business from the attic in Monmouth Street, encouraged by other visionaries such as George Speaight, author of Juvenile Drama (1946), and the photographer Edwin Smith, and enlisting the first generation of helpers for whom, down the years, shared enthusiasm substituted for earnings.

The museum began as a complementary attraction, gradually filling all floors of the house with a shop on the ground floor and the stock divided between the Dickensian basement and the Fawdrys' house at Wrotham, in Kent. Marguerite's friend Jacques Brunius, Surrealist and film-maker, lent and ultimately bequeathed his collection of optical toys. The museum displays were cunningly devised by the toymaker Yootha Rose and the display style was (and remains) a tightly packed cabinet of curiosities with strongly coloured backgrounds.

Marguerite Fawdry had an excellent eye and a lifelong curiosity about other cultures, reflected in the museum and the shop which was stocked with finds from the Fawdrys' long summer holidays in Italy, Yugoslavia and elsewhere.

Almost equal to the discovery of the Pollock stock was the chance find of a barn in the Dolomites full of wooden Dutch dolls packed in brown paper parcels for dispatch to a vanished pre-1914 toy market. Pollocks bought the lot and some of the dolls found themselves dressed in Pearly costume by a genuine Pearly Queen. There were toy-theatre sheets from Copenhagen, Epinal and Barcelona, American cast-iron automata banks and Japanese paper carp.

In the 1960s shopkeeping became a performing art and Marguerite Fawdry excelled in it. In George Speaight's words, "the shop became a mecca for parents in search of unusual toys and decorations; boutique owners in swinging Britain of the Sixties flocked to Monmouth Street in search of `with-it' stock for their shelves".

Fawdry's cosmopolitan outlook inspired her to produce brightly coloured reprints of simplified Victorian plays in multi-language European editions and in New York she and Kenneth, an equally compelling figure, did impromptu demonstrations for the buyers at Maceys and Bloomingdales. Pollocks catalogues were designed with witty graphics.

Having begun the fashionable revival of the Covent Garden area, Pollocks moved north to Fitzrovia. Marguerite was able to buy two adjacent houses on the corner of Whitfield Street and Scala Street for a larger museum, now a charitable trust, held exhibitions, including one on Chinese toys, on which she wrote one of her several entertaining and scholarly books. In 1980 Pollocks opened a shop in the newly refurbished Covent Garden Market, now devolved to its manager Peter Baldwin.

In his retirement, Kenneth Fawdry helped the business to flourish. His death in 1986 was a blow but Marguerite continued to run Scala Street with John Fawdry despite declining health, remarking recently, by way of explaining its business philosophy, that "no one in their right mind would have reprinted The Siege of Troy", the grandiose romantic play reissued in 1985.

Marguerite Desnieres, museum curator, writer, entrepreneur: born Bexleyheath, Kent 14 May 1912; married 1942 Kenneth Fawdry (died 1986; one son); died London 15 September 1995.

[Marguerite Fawdry Obituary, The Independent]

GSW10: Before the Festival

June 2, 2013: Straightening top of main stage curtain, & strengthening it by putting in grommets.

Before the curtains open, and the lights come up, there is...preparation!

See more here...

GSW10: Panel Discussion

Main festival stage.  Grand drape painted by Damiano Giambelli of Teatro del Corvo, Milano.
[Click to see full-size]

John Bell from Great Small Works shared this about last night's fascinating panel discussion after Program 3 ("Disaster!") of GSW's 10th International Toy Theater Festival:

The panel, titled "Who is Feeling the Heat? Moving the National and Local Discussion of Climate Change," featured (l. to r.) Jenny Romaine; artist and climate change activist Rachel Schragis; Helena Wong (Executive Director of CAAAV/NYC Chinatown Sandy Response); Diego Ibanez (organizer with Occupy Sandy in Far Rockaway); and Jenny Akchin (Occupy Sandy activist).

Poe-Dunk Matchbox Theatre

The mind boggles at the small scale!

Playlab NYC will present Poe-Dunk – A Matchbox Entertainment as a part of the 2012 FRIGID New York Festival.

Kevin performs a matchbox production

Kevin P. Hale, one of the founding members of Playlab NYC, is the creative mind behind these exceedingly small toy theatres.  Kevin has a blog where he explored openly shares his concepts and explorations - it makes pretty interesting reading!

Some characters are performed via matchsticks!

Kevin will be presenting a series of tiny-scaled plays based on the tales of Poe, including one called "The Oval Portrait":

The story was originally published as “Life in Death” and is the shortest of Poe’s stories. It was also the inspiration for Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. The actual story of the portrait only takes a single paragraph to tell, and everything else leading up it that story seems like filler. It was precisely because it was Poe's shortest work that I thought it would lend itself well to matchbox treatment.

Despite the tiny scale, color and design abound!

Toy Shop Virtual Tour

Little Story Houses

I happened upon these fun little theatres thanks to Benjamin Pollock's Toyshop today. The maker is a very talented young woman who also makes dolls...

Dramatis Personae: Catalogue 104

[CARTLICH, John.] A juvenile drama portrait, "Mr. Cartlich as Mazeppa." London: M. & M. Skelt, [c. 1838]. Contemporary hand coloring, fine and bright.


The latest Dramatis Personae catalogue is now available.

As always, there are several pieces of juvenile drama ephemera up for sale, including this example shown here.

William Appleton Collection: Digital Prints Online

This two-penny coloured sheet was featured this past week on a blog.

It's from the "Penny Plains" and "Two-pence Coloured:" English Theatrical Portraits 1799-1847 in the William Appleton Collection, which is described as...

306 toy theatre prints portraying plays and actors in character, from the early- to mid-19th century; these prints comprise the visual materials in the William Appleton collection of theatrical correspondence and ephemera, 1697-1930.

Confusing dates notwithstanding, it's worthy of a look, since it's all online. In fact, I found the collection most impressive, historically and artistically...Enjoy!

Toy Theatre Adaptions

I discovered a blog whose creator has been EXTREMELY talented in creating adaptions of famous literary works, for the toy theatre...simply marvelous!

NEW Dramatis Personae Catalogue!

There is a new Dramatis Personae catalogue out as of today. As per usual, the Dramatis Personae Booksellers have truly outdone themselves. I don't know what their secret is, but they are able to collect the most astounding array of Theatre/Entertainment ephemera I have ever seen, and present them to the world at large to buy and enjoy. I highly recommend you check them out!

Dramatis Personae: Catalogue 101

A complete set, eight sheets, of “Hodgson’s Characters in the Infernal Secret.” [London]: Hodgson & Co., 1822. Original hand coloring; light toning to edges; nicks to corners and edges, away from images; bright. [$400] One of the less common sets of Hodgson figures, with four shrouded inquisitors and the three sheets of scenarios (a pair to each).

So goes the description on Item #76, in the current Dramatis Personae catalogue, just announced today...

New Dramatis Personae Catalogue

The new Dramatis Personae catalogue online. This catalogue has some of the most unique and special ephemera you could find anywhere, including many relating to toy theatre. I highly recommend that you check them out...

Nineteenth-Century Stage Actors

Miniature portraits by J.L. Marks - Hand-coloured, os Mr Honner as Lord Rosslyn, Mr Gallot as Rugantino the Bravo of Venice, Mr O. Smith as Orsino, and Mrs Selby as Boadicea.