Victorian paper Theatres

Bri's picture

A great source of paper figures, old victorian paper theaters are popular craft objects online. In a way tangential to RPGs, performances were usually ad libed to a scenario rather than fully scripted, and could be as surreal as the performers imagination, combining characters and character archetypes from multiple sources, made easy by the popular newspaper and family magazines that from 1870-1914 printed thousands of scenic tableaux and characters, though only a small portion of such ephemera survives. The theaters themselves could be impressive art objects, with string pull curtains, stage elements, and even lighting effects in the most elaborate examples. Characters were usually mounted on long wires to animate them from side or below...