3 - Seymour and Company

Summary

A week after his engagement at Dublin's Theatre Royal ended on December 20, 1833, Aldridge accepted a contract for four nights at the Theatre in Limerick run by actor-manager Frank Seymour. Aldridge had known Seymour for years, having performed for him in Glasgow in April 1827, in Belfast in July 1829 (when Aldridge played opposite Charles Kean), and possibly in several other theaters Seymour had managed in Scotland and Ireland before 1834. The two men apparently were good friends, or perhaps, whatever they thought of each other, they saw renewed collaboration as working to their mutual advantage.

Both as an actor and as a manager Seymour was famous for his eccentricities. One veteran theatergoer recalled that

of all the strange men ever found in the theatrical circle, poor Frank Seymour was surely the strangest…. As an actor he had no real ability whatever. Off the stage he was a good sort of fellow enough, though like many of the old sort of stagers there was always an air of “Othello” or some other character about him. I see him in my mind's eye now—a low-sized stout man, with an air of threadbare neatness which was rather depressing in the reality. His rusty black gloves used to irritate me very much. On the stage he was a mere parrot. He brought no strength of intellect to bear on the arduous tasks he essayed. He did his best, poor soul, and he meant well, even if he achieved very little…. He often repeated his lines in a play apparently without the least grasp of their real meaning.

For instance, when he spoke Othello's lines,

Perdition catch my soul,

But I do love thee! And when I love thee not, Chaos is come again.

he mispronounced “chaos” as “chouse,” a term by which he afterward became familiarly known.

A spectator who had seen him perform in Belfast said he was “a queer character and a most unreliable man, who attempted all manner of parts and played them all badly.”