In addition to the permanent exhibition, several special exhibitions are on display in the rooms of the museum. The special exhibitions can be accessed with the museum ticket during the museum’s opening hours.
Exhibition Helle Laas of the First Theatre Impressions
Screen productions have played an important part in the repertoire of the Puppet Theatre ever since the theatre was founded (1952). In the 1990s, screen productions became more popular again. Classic fairy tales, commonly known children’s stories, made their way to the stage. It was also the period of launching the legendary stories for very young children, performed with screen puppets. The author of these stories is Helle Laas, puppet actor, director, and children’s author. Laas decided to start creating productions for young children that would be short and have almost no speech. Her decision was based on the idea that children who are just 2–4 years old have so little life experience that they need simple stories.
Therefore, several generations of children have received their first impressions of theatre while watching Laas’ screen productions. The exhibition dedicated to the 80th birthday of Helle Laas displays the protagonist of The Pink Fairy Tale (1994), her first screen production for young children, as well as the puppets from the four productions that followed it in the 1990s. The exhibition helps the visitor travel back in time across 25 years and visualise the first theatre visits of many people who are now adults.
The exhibition has been on display since 5 November 2021.
Exhibition The Puppets and Masks of Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels was performed altogether 25 times in the Viinistu boiler house during the summers of 2018 and 2019. In that production, not only the actors but also the puppets – one 7-metre-high and around 200 tiny ones, each of them only about 20 cm high – helped the audience visualise the very different dimensions of the giants and the Lilliputians. The exhibition displays the giant puppet and a great number of the small ones, as well as the giant masks that added bulkiness to the actors and the very creative costumes of the Lilliputian nobility. The author of the stage design and the puppets is Marion Undusk.
Location: the atrium of the theatre