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’.