ABSTRACT
In To-Night the Ballet (1934), Adrian Stokes writes of the enjoyment that children and grownups take in arranging the figures in a toy theatre. He suggests that the toy theatre grants us a fantasy of power, whereby we determine events that, in real life, are usually beyond our control. Although we lack the same degree of control when we go to an actual theatre, Stokes suggests that there is still the same fantastical engagement. We see various ‘prototypes, symbols, fears, [and] aspirations . . . externalised and dramatised within the open box of the stage’.1
