Alfred Maltby

Alfred Maltby (c. 1842 – 12 February 1901) was an English actor, costume designer, playwright and columnist. He began his theatrical career in 1872, becoming a much sought-after costume designer in the West End. By 1875 he began to write comic plays, which were successfully staged. Persuaded to take a role in one of his own pieces in 1876 he also began an acting career in which he specialised in playing comic, eccentric and usually elderly characters, for which portrayals he also earned enthusiastic reviews.

Maltby had a long and fruitful association with the actor-manager Charles Wyndham, becoming a regular member of his company at the Criterion Theatre in London. Outside the West End, Maltby toured in the British provinces and in Australia and New Zealand, maintaining simultaneous acting, designing and writing careers, and sometimes directing. He appeared in several of the first British productions of French farces by Alfred Hennequin and towards the end of his career he played in one of the first plays by Georges Feydeau to be seen in London. He also contributed columns to the humour magazines Judy and Fun.

Life and career Early years Maltby studied costume design in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts and began his theatrical career as a costume designer, starting with an 1872 Christmas production of The Black Crook at the Alhambra Theatre, London. Maltby was then engaged by F. B. Chatterton at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, where he worked on Shakespeare productions together with the scene painter, William Roxby Beverly. A later reviewer praised his "wonderful originality and the most exquisite taste … almost literally enchanting". Maltby became much sought after, and recalled that in one Christmas season he designed the costumes for shows at twelve different theatres. In 1876 the actor Charles Collette invited Maltby to write him a one-act farce, suggesting it should be based on the 18th-century comedy A Bold Stroke for a Wife. The result, Bounce, was successfully played on tour and then at the Opera Comique in a double-bill with Collette's play Cryptoconchoidsyphonostomata. Collette persuaded the author to take a part in his own piece and to take over the role of the querulous eccentric Toddleposh in Collette's play. After this, Maltby divided his time between acting, writing and costume design. This began a long association between Wyndham and Maltby. The former's next London production, The Pink Dominos (1877), was also a box-office success, and he sent out a touring company with Maltby again cast as an eccentric old gentleman. The Era ranked his performances in the two plays as "among the most remarkable in modern comedy".

When Wyndham was preparing the London production of a third farce – Betsy (1879), F. C. Burnand's adaptation of Bébé – he cast Maltby as the eccentric tutor. For the first production, Maltby contributed further by writing a two-act curtain raiser, a "comic drama" called Jilted, which The Era later described as one of his cleverest achievements as a writer". and co-wrote and appeared in La Belle Normande, an opéra bouffe adapted from Léon Vasseur's La Famille Trouillat. He was co-author of The Three Hats (1883), an adaptation of Hennequin's Les Trois chapeaux, and author of Old Flames (1884), an English version of 115 Rue Pigalle by Alexandre Bisson. Another well-received piece was his farce Borrowed Plumes (Adelphi Theatre, 1885). When Wyndham revived the 18th-century comedy Wild Oats in 1886 Maltby played Lamp, the oily theatrical manager.

Later in 1886 Wyndham sent a company to Australia and New Zealand. Maltby was known to playgoers there as the author of The Three Hats, which proved popular with audiences in both countries, and he was well received as a performer. During his stay, in addition to playing several of his regular parts, he designed costumes for, and co-wrote, the Theatre Royal, Melbourne's Christmas pantomime, played his first non-comic role, Captain Redwood in Jim the Penman, In the 19th century, the term "stage-manager" covered the artistic functions now ascribed to directors as well as the purely technical aspects of staging to which "stage-manager" has subsequently come to be restricted. |group=n

Later years

Throughout the late 1880s and 1990s Maltby continued his tripartite career as actor, writer and designer. In addition to plays, his writing included regular contributions to Judy and Fun. Alfred Hennequin, he starred in 1896 in one of the first farces of Hennequin's successor Georges Feydeau to be given in London. Maltby appeared with Fred Terry, Weedon Grossmith and Ellis Jeffreys in His Little Dodge (1896), an adaptation of Le Système Ribadier by Feydeau and Hennequin's son Maurice. The Era described Maltby and the play as "making a big hit".

Maltby died at his home in Chipperfield, Hertfordshire, on 12 February 1901, aged 59.

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