One of the three melodramatic playlets Aubrey Ellis wrote for his Old Time Music Hall & Melodrama bill — a send-up of penny-dreadful theatre, played dead straight for maximum villainy. The piece first appeared at Ye Olde Chastity Belt, where it ran for seven months to warm reviews, and returned to the stage in November 1974 as part of A Victorian Melodrama at the Boulevard Theatre, Pretoria, alongside its companion pieces “His Brother’s Caper” and “Old Time Music Hall.”

Aubrey took the role of Ruffane — a “sinister, moustacheoed, black-browed villain” — hamming it up against Evelyn Kesting’s wide-eyed heroine Floretta and Anthony Flesch’s upright hero Rodney, with Beryl as Mother and Aubrey Dwyer as the amnesiac convict Fatty Farnsworth, who holds the key to the whole diabolical plot. True to music-hall tradition, the audience was handed paper missiles to pelt the villain with on cue.

Critics took to it warmly: the Pretoria News called Aubrey’s Ruffane “a deft understanding of just how far he can go with hammed-up hyperbole,” while the Afrikaans press praised the evening’s “lekker, ligte lawwigheid” — nice, light silliness, pure and simple.