Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Part I 1660 to 1800
- Part II 1800 to 1895
- 11 Introduction: the theatre from 1800 to 1895
- 12 Presence, personality and physicality: actors and their repertoires, 1776–1895
- 13 Theatres, their architecture and their audiences
- 14 Stage design from Loutherbourg to Poel
- 15 Theatre and mid-Victorian society, 1851–1870
- 16 Gendering Victorian theatre
- 17 Popular entertainment, 1776–1895
- 18 The Bells: a case study A ‘bare-ribbed skeleton’ in a chest
- 19 The new drama and the old theatre
- 20 1895 A critical year in perspective
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
14 - Stage design from Loutherbourg to Poel
from Part II - 1800 to 1895
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- Part I 1660 to 1800
- Part II 1800 to 1895
- 11 Introduction: the theatre from 1800 to 1895
- 12 Presence, personality and physicality: actors and their repertoires, 1776–1895
- 13 Theatres, their architecture and their audiences
- 14 Stage design from Loutherbourg to Poel
- 15 Theatre and mid-Victorian society, 1851–1870
- 16 Gendering Victorian theatre
- 17 Popular entertainment, 1776–1895
- 18 The Bells: a case study A ‘bare-ribbed skeleton’ in a chest
- 19 The new drama and the old theatre
- 20 1895 A critical year in perspective
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
On 21 February 1896, in the Great Hall of the Polytechnic Institution at 309 Regent Street, London, the first cinema audience in Britain saw a moving picture show – the Cinématographe – of the films of August and Louis Lumière. The show, lasting approximately seventeen minutes, was projected onto a screen 6 feet by 4 feet 6 inches and showed some ten ‘actualities’, including scenes of a landing stage, boating, bathing in the Mediterranean, a collapsing wall and the arrival of a train in a railway station. In some ways, this event might be seen as the achievement of a project begun some 125 years beforehand by Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740-1812) at Drury Lane. However, Michael Booth cautions that the arrival of film ‘was not at all the culmination of a teleological process in which the theatre struggled clumsily towards the divine glory of cinematic realism, but simply one of the many responses of an increasingly sophisticated entertainment technology to the demand for pictorial realism’. Loutherbourg’s project was to present ‘realistic’ and pictorial images of places and events that his audience would recognize as authentic and topographically accurate. In doing so, he considerably expanded scenographic subject matter to include scenes of significant and noteworthy landscapes, scenes of current events and scenes which presented exotic and far-away places that few in the audience had seen and that were the result of his considerable study and research. This had the effect of endowing theatre and scenography with a sense of purpose and authority that was quite new in the eighteenth century. Since much of this material seemed suited to the travelogue, his project began to make the theatre a ‘window on the world’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of British Theatre , pp. 309 - 330Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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