Neat mannerisms highlight these predatory aspects – the stretching, as if preparing for a fight the occasional drop to the haunches, evoking a tennis player about to receive a serve and the strangely chilling hands slicking back his black hair when he needs to compose himself.Īt the same time, he is phenomenally charismatic, and you do feel yourself being sucked in, charmed in the same way Trilby is. He sees in Trilby not a person, but an animal to be trained. The one-woman performance by Chloe-Ann Tylor is terrific, creating a perfect balance in the titular Svengali. It’s a neat, declarative summation of the previous 40 minutes, where we are led by the collar through the story of a tennis prodigy who is chewed up and spat out by her monstrous coach, left to process the blur of events that’s happened to her. On his death bed, he said: ‘ popularity has killed me at last.“Nature is mental,” so comes a line toward the end of this captivating reimaging of George Du Maurier’s Svengali. Strangest of all, you could buy a foot-shaped Trilby ice cream, too.ĭu Maurier, who had tried to persuade Henry James to write the story, found its success traumatic. You could buy a silver scarf-pin modelled after it.

A newspaper printed a lifesize outline of the ‘perfect Trilby foot’. The fetish didn’t go unmarked commercially: the name Trilby was given to a style of high-heeled shoe. One of the novel’s curiosities is that its sexual undertones are sublimated into an obsession with Trilby’s feet. A whole town in Florida was named after it, with streets named for its other characters. There were Trilby soaps, sweets and toothpaste, Trilby dolls and fans. There was a Trilby ham and a Trilby sausage (‘something new fills a long-felt want’, the copy said). The last vestiges of Trilbyana, the craze it inspired, remain in the style of hat, but for a few years Trilby was ubiquitous. Trilby wasn’t just a literary phenomenon. Svengali is, among other things, a grotesquely antisemitic caricature. The most successful of these is Svengali, whose supernatural powers enable him to dominate and ultimately destroy her. It is the story of Trilby O’Farrell, a young, promiscuous free-spirit in 1850s bohemian Paris and the men who want to control her. Issued as a book in the US on 8 September 1894, it sold 100,000 copies in a month within five months, 200,000. First serialised in Harper’s Magazine beginning in January 1894, it added 100,000 to the magazine’s circulation before its second instalment.

Svengali is one of those rare literary creations that becomes shorthand for a kind of behaviour: in this case, mesmeric control over another.He originated in George du Maurier’s novel Trilby. Whenever Dominic Cummings makes the headlines, commentators reach for the same word to describe his relationship with the prime minister: he is Boris Johnson’s Svengali.

Trilby svengali