ABSTRACT
The theatre has nothing to learn from its infant offshoot. . . . By com parison with the flesh and blood reality of a spoken play, it is drama in cold storage.
(Albert Chevalier, 1910, quoted in Low, 1971: 261)
British cinema drew on a range of styles and traditions, particularly the London West End theatre and music hall.1 The West End provided the first film actors and scripts, and music halls were the earliest public arenas for cinema exhibition, as well as bequeathing a stock of variety comedy acts. Ambivalent in their response to the new medium, with its ability to reach millions and its relative permanence, both theatre and music-hall were anxious to forge a symbiotic relationship with cinema. But as the above quotation shows, it was a relationship fraught with tension.
