Au Music-Hall offers a curious prophetic link between Max Linder and Charles Chaplin, neither of whom was a familiar name to the public when it was released in January 1907. Linder was just a useful stock player at Pathé: it would be two more years before he fully established  his character of “Max”. Not until 1908 was Chaplin to make a name for himself in the music halls, as a coming star of Fred Karno’s Speechless Comedians.
The link between them is Karno’s most successful sketch “Mumming Birds”, quickly run up for a special matinee in 1904 and developed under the successive titles of “Twice Nightly” (which proved confusing on the posters), and “A Stage Upon a Stage”. The setting was a music-hall stage, upon which a succession of ever more disastrously inept performers appeared, to the cat-calls and assaults of the occupants of stage boxes on either side of the set. The star role of a drunken swell in the lower prompt-side box was at various times played by all the Karno stars, including both Charles and Sydney Chaplin and Stan Laurel (as Stanley Jefferson). The sketch was a huge success in the USA and certainly played in Paris. Au Music-Hall is a shameless plagiarism of “Mumming Birds”, for which Karno promptly brought action against Pathé. He won, but complained that the damages awarded did not justify the trouble of the case.
In Autumn 1908 Chaplin himself played “Mumming Birds” in Paris. Subsequently he was to perpetuate his performance in the role in his 1915 Essanay film A Night at the Show, which maintains the central idea of the sketch, while opening out the action and giving him a second character, Mr. Pest, a drunken galleryite. But the 24-year-old Linder had beaten him to it.

David Robinson