19 - Covent Garden

Summary

Covent Garden was a theater in which a single performance could make or mar an unknown actor's reputation. It was a rigorous testing ground for provincial actors who had attracted attention outside London and had thereby earned an opportunity to display their talent before a large metropolitan audience. Being invited to perform at a patent theater in the capital was a sign of professional recognition but it was no guarantee of success. The performer would have to please not only the manager who had hired him and the numerous critics whose job it was to evaluate him publicly but also the people who had paid to see what he was able to do onstage. For an actor this was a chance of a lifetime. Those who succeeded stood to gain a substantial boost in their career, leading possibly to riches or at least to regular employment in London or elsewhere. Those who failed might be quickly forgotten or ignored and might never have another opportunity to prove their competence on the boards of a patent theater. So the stakes were quite high for any actor who took the stage at Covent Garden for the first time. The trial could materially affect his future.

The English sports writer Pierce Egan once remarked that

no set of men suffer more from hopes and fears than actors in their state of probation to acquire the London stamp, and numbers of “great creatures,” with all their talents and exertions, are doomed to a life of obscurity in the provinces, realizing little more than empty houses, empty cupboards, and empty pockets, till the curtain falls on their chequered existence—“full o sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Aldridge was not entirely unknown in London. He had performed for several months at the Royalty and Royal Coburg in 1825 and later for several nights at Sadler's Wells, the Royal Pavilion, and the Royal Olympic in the winter of 1829–30, but these were minor theaters that did not attract the amount of media attention that routinely was given to productions at Covent Garden and Drury Lane. Also, he was billed in those early years as Mr. Keene; now, after the death of Edmund Kean, he had dropped the homonym and was presenting himself under his real name, Mr. Aldridge, but with a fictional ethnic identity—“a native of Senegal.”