10 - Expanding the Repertoire

Summary

For the next twenty months Aldridge returned to touring the provinces, playing mostly in small towns where he had never before been seen. Some of these towns—Lichfield, Leamington, Ledbury—had no newspapers in 1828, and others that were larger—Worcester, Southampton, Hereford— gave him little or no coverage, so there is scant evidence to show how his performances were received for the remainder of this year. The remarks in the Worcester Journal that “it excites surprise that he is national only in his figure; close application, aided by a voice fine, flexible and manly, has overcome all the imperfections we expect to find in the ‘Poor African’; his knowledge of stage business is equal to that of a veteran” suggests that he continued to astonish such audiences with his unanticipated professionalism and polish. “Unfortunately, he did not attract full houses” in Southampton, but this may have been normal for unknown performers who had not previously acted there.

Surviving playbills and newspaper notices from this period reveal that Aldridge preferred to appear as Othello and Mungo on his opening night, thereby establishing simultaneously his credentials as both a tragedian and a comedian and in the process treating spectators to a double surprise. This was a pattern he followed throughout the rest of his career. It was an effective way to win over audiences, for these were two of the best roles in his repertoire for displaying the full range of his abilities.

On subsequent nights he would go through his usual round of melodramatic heroes—Oroonoko, Rolla, Zanga, Gambia—but he hadn't yet found another farcical role to complement Mungo, so he sometimes repeated The Padlock as an afterpiece to a string of serious plays. To add to the humor, he now started regularly to insert the song “Possum up a Gum Tree” into the farce or to perform it as a separate interlude between plays, making explicit its connection with Mathews's spoof of the African Tragedian.