9 - Staging a Comeback

Summary

The last three months of 1845 proved to be an important transitional period for Aldridge, for it marked the time he finally disbanded his small troupe and returned to the legitimate stage, performing with local acting companies throughout the British Isles. Theater managers in increasing numbers began to seek him out to invite him to spend a week or two with them as a visiting star playing a selection of his favorite roles. These offers came from theaters in some of the largest provincial municipalities—Belfast, Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Newcastle upon Tyne in 1845 along with contracts for return engagements at these venues—as well as new assignments at Bristol, Bath, Manchester, Wolverhampton, and Brighton in 1846, and additional performances at Canterbury, Dublin, Cork, Edinburgh, Belfast, Liverpool, and a host of other respectable sites in 1847. At long last he was in great demand, and he was kept busy week after week fulfilling lucrative contracts. He also played at a succession of smaller theaters where box office receipts were less impressive but audiences were very enthusiastic about his performances.

What accounts for this turnaround in his professional life? For the previous twelve years, ever since his departure from London, he had supported himself, his wife, and often a small traveling company by performing mostly in towns that had neither a proper theater building nor a tradition of regular theatrical entertainment. In his first few years in Ireland he occasionally had linked up with peripatetic theater companies run by Frank Seymour and John William Calcraft that traversed a circuit of country towns and villages. He also was offered a few engagements in Dublin. But it was only after he devised a new type of entertainment in 1835—a lecture with accompanying dramatic illustrations—that he could keep himself fully employed and earn an adequate living as an actor. And while he was doing this, he had become nearly invisible in the larger theatrical world. His activities were seldom reported in London or in the theatrical media of the day.

Ironically, it may have been the death hoax that brought the name of the “African Roscius” back into public consciousness.