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This was an unexpected find! Musical comedy darling and Noel Coward's long time friend, performing partner and muse Gertrude Lawrence dressed up as a member of the Ku Klux Klan for a comedy number in the revue "Rats!" which ran from February to September 1923 at the Vaudeville Theatre in London's West End. The lyrics were written by Ronald Jeans, and music by Philip Braham. The publicity for the show, as in the image from The Sketch above, mentioned Lawrence's name as she was very much the top billed performer alongside a talented cast that included Norah Blaney and Gwen Farrar, and Alfred Lester, but the programme for the show lists that particular song as being performed by Velma Deane and Company.
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Another curio from the Lord Chamberlain's Plays Collection - a sketch performed at the Lewisham Hippodrome in April 1913 and set at an unnamed London Underground station, in which the Devil (later revealed to be a medical student in costume as Mephistopheles) and his wife (later revealed to be a nurse in costume as a Folly) are waiting for either a tube train or an airship to take them home. About halfway through the piece the Devil brags to a Policeman that he is inciting militant suffragettes to commit violent crimes. As he is getting arrested a suffragette runs in, puts something into a handily adjacent post box that sets it on fire, shouts "Votes for Women" and runs off, pursued by the Policeman. There's a reference to the Devil's wife being a hunger-striker too. Curious!
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