fraternity, the Grand Order of Water Rats. In 1906, he would serve as "King Rat" for the order. In 1894, free from his contractual obligations at Drury Lane, he took a three-year break from the English music hall scene and travelled to France to fulfil a number of engagements; over the next ten years, he divided his time between there and England. In the early months of 1895, he moved from music hall to variety theatre, a transition which many of his contemporaries had already successfully achieved. Lord Tom Noddy was showcased in September 1896 and ran at the Garrick Theatre, London for two months. The production had minimal success in the capital but was received well in the provinces. The show provided Little Tich with the chance to promote himself as a serious actor and to separate himself from the reputation of simply being the "deformed dwarf from the music hall". The audience were described as being "very large" whose "bursts of laughter w[ere] frequent and loud". A reporter for the Edinburgh Evening News thought that Little Tich was "the life and soul of the sketch" whose singing was "fairly good while [his] dancing was smart", while the critic William Archer dismissed Little Tich as being the "Quasimodo of the music halls, whose talent lies in a grotesque combination of agility with deformity". He formed his own theatre company in mid-1895, and produced his first show called Lord Tom Noddy, in which he also starred. He commissioned the dramatist George Dance to write the piece and made him a partner in the company. On 11 December 1896, Little Tich was invited to appear at the Folies Bergère in France, where he starred in a short piece as Miss Turpentine and performed the Big-Boot Dance. One journalist for the Sunday Referee claimed that "no artist since Loie Fuller, four years earlier, had scored such a success", and as a result, he signed a two-year contract at the Folies. Little Tich returned to England in the later months of 1897, where he self-produced the second of his company's two shows, a musical comedy called Billy. Despite the show enjoying a healthy provincial tour after opening in Newcastle, one reporter thought that "it ha[d] not very much to recommend it", but thought that Little Tich gave "some excellent fooling" and that it "[was] impossible not to laugh at some of the eccentricities".