Friends of the University of Bristol Theatre Collection Online event

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Trilby is the story of hypnotic performances, inescapable mesmerism and influential bodies. When Herbert Beerbohm Tree set George Du Maurier’s bestselling novel on the stage in 1895, he centred the hypnotic relationship between the eponymous artist’s model and her controlling puppet-master Svengali. Tree cast Dorothea Baird as the striking artist’s model, taking the role of the menacing musician-cum-hypnotist himself. The magnetic performances of Tree and Baird underscored the question of influence raised by the story itself and put the question of controlled and controlling influence centre stage. There were in fact many anxieties about the concept and force of influence at the end of the nineteenth century. Not unlike today, these anxieties ranged from quite literal fears about “alien” immigrants and supposedly unassimilable Jews, to more oblique worries about the influence of the aesthetic movement and the commercial dandy and an increasing awareness of celebrity influence and the cult of “personality.” In this talk Dr Isabel Stowell-Kaplan will explore the production and casting choices made by Tree along with the critical reception of his dramatic blockbuster to explore the idea of mesmerism and the force of influence.

Isabel Stowell-Kaplan is a Marie Curie Research Fellow in the Department of Theatre at the University of Bristol. Her first book Staging Detection, from Hawkshaw to Holmes was published with Routledge in 2021 and her work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Performance Research, TDR: The Drama Review, SHAW and Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film. Her current project, Theatre and the Presence of Influence, examines how the theatre world’s obsession with “influence” at the turn of the twentieth century created new forms of stage presence. By understanding the staging of anxieties about “insidious” influence as well as the staging of fantasies of “controlled” influence upon the world, the book unlocks new genealogies of theatrical presence grounded in the materiality of the performing body.

Booking open NOW via Eventbrite link below. 

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bodies-of-influence-hypnotic-performance-in-herbert-beerbohm-trees-trilby-registration-821737056657?aff=oddtdtcreator