George du Maurier (1834-1896) was first and foremost an illustrator and his cartoons, lampooning upper-class English society, appeared regularly in Punch. He originated the phrase, the Curate’s Egg. Trilby, his novel, published in 1894 was a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic and sold over 200,000 copies. The stage version in 1895 at the Theatre Royal in Haymarket, with actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Svengali (one of his most famous roles) made so much money that Tree was able to raise enough capital to build Her Majesty’s Theatre on the other side of the road.
There were Trilby parties, Trilby shoes, Trilby boots, Trilby bonnets, even Trilby sweets, lozenges and sausages. Today, Trilby is best known as a soft felt hat.
Du Maurier studied art in Paris in 1856 and his novel is set in the Latin Quarter in the same period. The boisterous artists recall the characters in Henri Murger’s Scenes de la vie de Boheme, immortalized by Puccini. Paul M Potter’s adaptation feels like a libretto for a musical comedy.
Trilby O’Ferrall (Rebecca Brewer), an artist’s model, much admired for her feet, falls under the spell of Svengali (Jack Claff), a German-Polish Jewish musician, who turns her into a world famous diva, a remarkable feat since she is totally unmusical and tone deaf. She can, in fact, sing only when she is under his hypnosis and when he dies during the interval at one of her concerts and she performs without him, her voice is so awful that the audience boos her off the stage.
The performances in David Cottis’s production are too big and far too loud for Finborough’s tiny stage. Jack Claff’s blackguard and wife-beater (who looks like he might have stepped out of one of Du Maurier’s anti-Semitic drawings) acts as if he were at Drury Lane.