The Screen’s a Stage: Showmanship and Early Film in the West End

Join researcher Alex Kirstukas to explore the imaginative experiments that flourished when London’s theatre district first encountered film.

Before ‘going to the cinema’ was an established pastime, there was film itself: a spectacular new invention with many possible uses and no fixed expectations. Creative workers in London’s booming theatre industry were quick to seize on moving pictures and to explore how they might be used onstage.

Meanwhile, local legislators, noticing the extreme flammability of film reels, threw themselves into stopping the new invention from burning the West End to the ground. What ensued, on the way to establishing cinema as a recognized cultural practice, was more than twenty years of lively debate, clashes and collaborations between arts workers and government, and wild experiments in combining theatre and film.

This illustrated talk draws on The London Archives’ records of the London County Council, alongside historical images and film clips, to offer a closer look at some of the multimedial entertainments in the West End in the earliest years of cinema.

Alex Kirstukas is a postgraduate researcher in drama and music at Royal Holloway University of London, currently studying connections between live performance and early film on an AHRC/technē Collaborative Doctoral Award with the London Archives.