The young Oscar Wilde’s Russian revolutionary drama reveals a playwright divided

Vera; or, The Nihilists concerns a plot to kill a tsar but after Alexander II was assassinated, its London premiere was cancelled. Now receiving a rare production, it captures his conflict between ethics and aestheticsWho wrote the following: “When private property is abolished, there will be no necessity for crime”? In one of his plays the same writer has a female revolutionary cry: “How easy is it for a king to kill his people by thousands but we cannot rid ourselves of one crowned man in Europe.” If I reveal that the writer was a London-based Irishman, most people would assume it was Bernard Shaw. In fact, it was Oscar Wilde and, while the first quote comes from his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, the last is from his play Vera; or, The Nihilists which is to get a rare professional production at the Brockley Jack Studio theatre, south-east London, in September.The play itself is virtually unknown even to Wildean devotees. It was written in 1879 and loosely based on the story of a 22-year-old Russian revolutionary who had attempted to shoot the St Petersburg chief of police. Wilde’s version is set in Moscow but his heroine, Vera Sabouroff, has a similar political ardour and leads a band of nihilists who plan to assassinate the tsar. That is only the starting-point for a robustly noisy melodrama that was intended for London production in 1881. But the actual assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March of that year and the fact that the Prince of Wales was married to the sister of the new tsarina killed it stone dead. When it was eventually produced in New York in 1883, it was greeted with sneery disdain and, aside from the odd amateur revival, has lain buried ever since. Continue reading...

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