it is not surprising that the stage version of
"Trilby" should prove in some respects unsatisfactory. It might be
thought that the book would lend itself readily to dramatic treatment;
but a little consideration will show that it offers peculiar
difficulties to the playwright, inasmuch as its chief charm is one of
manner, which cannot be transferred to the stage, while its story,
although it contains some striking situations, such as Trilby's collapse
upon the death of Svengali, consists chiefly of a series of episodes,
largely independent of each other and strung together very loosely. All
things considered, Mr. Potter ought not, perhaps, to be held to too
strict an account for the liberties he has taken with the text and some
of the personages, but he has certainly lowered the tone of the work,
and been guilty of various crudities of construction. There is some
excuse for his employment of Svengali as the evil influence which wrecks
the happiness of Little Billee and Trilby, but he leaves nothing of the
author's original intention, and infinitely belittles the character of
the girl, when he attributes her flight from her lover to mesmeric
suggestion, instead of her own noble and unselfish devotion. In many
other similar ways the spiritual side of the book suffers at his hands.
His persistent references to Trilby's posing for the figure, his
selection of that particular incident for her first introduction, and
the joking references to it which he puts into the mouths of other
personages, are in bad taste, while his travesty of the character of
Dr. Bagot is entirely without justification. Mrs. Bagot he treats with
more consideration, but he reduces her to the level of the dullest stage
conventionality. Trilby herself preserves a good many of her
characteristics, but is degraded even more than in the book by her
subserviency to Svengali.

The play is in four acts, and the whole story up to the flight of Trilby
is compressed into the first two. This feat is accomplished with no
small ingenuity, but at great cost of probability. In this brief space
Trilby is wooed and won, Svengali asserts his mesmeric power, the
marriage of Little Billee is arranged and interrupted by the arrival of
his mother, and an elopement is planned and frustrated. In the third act
Trilby is to sing in the Cirque des Bashibazouck, and all the characters
reassemble as if by magic in the foyer of that temple of art, which is
abandoned of all other pe