Vera: Or, The Nihilists by Oscar Wilde. The Brockley Jack Studio Theatre, 410 Brockley Road, London SE4 until 27 September 2025, 4☆☆☆☆. Review: William Russell.
Photo Credit: Henry Roberts.
Vera: Or, The Nihilists by Oscar Wilde. The Brockley Jack Studio Theatre, 410 Brockley Road, London SE4 until 27 September 2025,
4☆☆☆☆. Review: William Russell.
“A Wilde evening.”
There is a lot to be said for reviving long forgotten plays – hence the four stars. Sometimes the passage of time has even added to the quality they had when originally produced so Third Thing Productions and director Cecilia Thoden van Velzen are to be congratulated for taking a risk with Oscar Wilde's first play. Written in 1880 it was loosely based on events in Russia a few years previously when a woman called Vera Sabouroff had assassinated the governor of St Petersburg. The play was to have been staged in London but that did not happen. Three years later it was put on in New York by a producer who saw the role of Vera as one for his wife and Wilde went there to supervise the production. It lasted a week. The reviews were damning – long drawn, dramatic rot, wearisome, little better than fizzle and Vera bad declared the critics. It is impossible to disagree. The current cast try hard to inject some life into a complicated tale and there are moments when Wilde's gift for language is there but the tangled plot and the tricky but initially intriguing set consisting of of screens which keep getting shifted to little effect do not help, Vera, played by Natasha Culzae, leaves her home in the country for Moscow to avenge her brother, who has been dispatched to Siberia, where she falls in with the Nihilists, a revolutionary sect, and becomes their leading assassin. She also meets the Crown Prince Alexis, played by George Airey, who is mixing with the Nihilists as he is opposed to his father the Tsar and has plans to modernise Russia. They fall in love. It then gets hard to follow and the gender-blind casting does not make things any clearer. However, the reason for seeing it is because it is a chance to see the first work of one of the great dramatists of the English theatre. That it is what Wilde's most celebrated biographer Richard Ellman said - “a wretched play” - is neither here nor there and, whatever else, it will not bore you to tears.
Cast
Natasha Culzac – Vera Sabouroff
George Airey – Alexis Ivanaeievitch
Kat Kim – Prime Minister Maraloffski
Jonathan Hausler – Peter Sabouroff & Czar Ivan
Jo Idris-Roberts – President of the Nihilists & Baron Raff
Finn Samuels – Michael Stroganoff & Count Rouvaloff
Catherine Allison – Kotemkin
Creatives
Director – Cecilia Thoden van Velzen
Costume Designer – Anastasiia Glazova
Set Designer – Ruth Varela
Music & Sound Design – George Airey & Cecilia Thoden van Velzen
Lighting Design – Ruth Varela
