About Me

Thirty years ago, I built a wooden Pollock toy theatre for my children. I loved the idea of it. What arrived, though, was a handful of characters on sticks that toppled over the moment you let go, and a couple of plays that ran to barely two pages. There was no way to add new characters or new plays — the company that sold it had no interest in taking things any further. I remember feeling let down by something I’d wanted so much to love.

I’m Simon, and that disappointment, three decades on, is the reason this business exists.

My career has been spent making things for other people — documents, images, videos, whole communication strategies for organisations who needed someone to bring an idea to life. More recently, my wife Karon and I designed and built our own house together. Making has always been the constant, whatever form it’s taken.

I’ve also always loved history, and like most people, I love the theatre. So when I found myself thinking back to that first toy theatre, and to everything it could have been, the two interests collided. I wondered whether I could do better. That question turned into two years of designing, testing, and refining, working out how a single idea could grow from a one-off project into a proper small craft business.

Along the way, I’ve fallen back in love with the history of theatre itself, and worked out how to build a simple table theatre that isn’t locked to one style of puppet — or should I say, one style of avatar?

The idea is simple: buy a theatre on its own, and make your own puppets and plays for it. Or buy the complete package — theatre, set, characters, and a ready-written play — and start performing straight away. Either way, the theatre isn’t a one-play object. It’s a stage you can keep coming back to, whether you’re building a whole theatre group or just enjoying an evening of storytelling on your own.

And why Suffolk? Because it’s where we live — and because I’m of an age that remembers when Britain used to make things properly. I’d like to see a bit more of that again.

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www.MyTableTheatre.com