The School of English cordially invites you to attend the following seminar offered by Dr. Isabel Stowell-Kaplan:

Irresistible Influences: Herbert Beerbohm Tree and the Mesmerizing Trilby

Dr. Isabel Stowell-Kaplan, The University of Bristol

June 7, 2024, Friday, 4:30 p.m.

Room 7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, The University of Hong Kong

When the glittering actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree set George Du Maurier’s bestselling novel on the stage in 1895, he gave himself the starring role. Cast as Svengali, the malignant hypnotist-musician, Tree focused in one performance the fin-de-siècle fascination with influence. Beerbohm Tree’s magnetic performance as the aesthete and the Jew crystallized anxieties circulating about undue influence understood as threats not only to the individual Englishman but to the national culture and character. Svengali’s own successful and hypnotic performance was in fact the dark inverse of Tree’s radiating cultural influence. Tree’s own standing – he would go on to open his own theatre just two years later and was knighted in 1909 – symbolized the apotheosis of English cultural achievement and global influence. At the very same time, Tree remained the susceptible actor who could transform himself all too easily into the so-called alien influencer. In this talk, I will examine the at once intersecting and divergent iterations of influence contained within the dazzling performance and affecting figure of Tree himself as well as the ways in which theatre played a unique role in helping to shape the significance of influence at the turn of the century.

Dr Isabel Stowell-Kaplan is a scholar of nineteenth and early twentieth-century British and American theatre with a further expertise in contemporary theatre and performance art. She has just completed a Horizon 2020 EU Marie Curie Research Fellowship 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 numerous scholarly journals including Performance Research, TDR: The Drama Review, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film and SHAW. Her current book project, Presence: Theatre of Influence in the Fin-de-Siècle examines the theatre world’s fascination with “influence” in the late nineteenth century.