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. Wyndham and The Criterion In 1877 the actor-manager Charles Wyndham was starring at the Criterion Theatre in The Great Divorce Case, an adaptation of Hennequin and Delacour's farce Le Procès Veauradieux. The success of the piece in the West End prompted a provincial tour, managed by Richard D'Oyly Carte. Wyndham had seen Maltby as Toddleposh and thought him ideal for the role of the eccentric and somnolent Wetherby Grandison. Maltby was reluctant to take the part, but Carte, together with Maltby's friend the theatre manager John Gunn, persuaded him. 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. The play was a success, and Maltby was highly praised in the press. He played the part in several revivals of the piece, and in 1896 The Sketch said of him, "No playgoer will ever call to mind the name of Mr. Alfred Maltby without thinking of his wonderful performance of Samuel Dawson, B.A., the private tutor in Betsy". 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". At the Criterion and later, Maltby played his eccentric old gentlemen characters in such plays as Truth, The Candidate, The Man with Three Wives, My Artful Valet and others "too numerous to mention". The Sketch reviewer also noted that Maltby had "severe epidemics as regards the various kinds of old gentlemen he is called upon to portray ... at one time he had a