12 - Playing New Roles

Summary

Aldridge, at the age of twenty-one, had now been on stage in the British Isles for nearly five years. Up to this point in his career, he had appeared in at least seventeen different plays, had enacted scenes from King Richard III, and had done an imitation of Charles Mathews's skit on the African Tragedian. After performing eight of these roles in his first year at the Royalty and Royal Coburg Theatres in London, he had added only four more plus a version of the Mathews skit in his initial three years on tour, and in 1829 he had ambitiously experimented with five more characters (six if we count Richard III), some of whom were non-African. Most of the experiments did not remain in his repertoire for long. After two or three attempts he abandoned them. The same was true of such early London vehicles as The Divan of Blood, The Negro's Curse, and The Death of Christophe, which he seldom or never acted in later years. The roles he played most often continued to be, in order of frequency, Mungo, Gambia, Othello, and Oroonoko—dependable staples on the British stage in the early decades of the nineteenth century. He also appeared occasionally as Zanga in The Revenge, Hassan in The Castle Spectre, Sambo in Laugh When You Can, Rolla in Pizarro, and Alambra in Paul and Virginia.

These roles could keep him employed for at least a week at most provincial theaters and for perhaps two weeks or more in large cities where some of the plays could be repeated to different audiences, but it wasn't a repertoire large or diverse enough to secure him a permanent position in a standing theater or a touring company. He would have to continue to ply his trade on the road, moving from place to place by carriage, and carrying all his costumes, props and personal effects with him. His wife traveled with him much of the time, but periodically he would leave her in one town while he moved on to others, and they would meet up again some weeks later. It was a precarious peripatetic existence, but it was the only way he could make a living as an actor.