'It Pays To Advertise' Summary

It was first presented on the Broadway stage on 8 September 1914, at the Cohan Theatre and ran for nearly a year. The playwrights substantially rewrote the play for a new production in London by the actor-manager Tom Walls, at the Aldwych Theatre. This opened on 2 February 1924 and closed on 10 July 1925, a total of 598 performances. It was the first of a sequence of twelve "Aldwych farces" presented at the theatre until 1933, mostly original farces written by Ben Travers. By contrast with later plays in the series, in which Walls played worldly and sometimes shady characters, with Ralph Lynn as his naïve associate, in It Pays to Advertise Walls's character is upright and conventional, and Lynn is the manipulative schemer.