19
Oct
Oscar Wilde completed his first play, Vera, or The Nihilists in 1880, and eagerly sought to get it produced. In letters to aquitanced actors, he expressed a mixture of youthful pride, and the nervousness of a young writer keen to gain the appreciation and advice of those he admired. He wrote to actress Ellen Terry saying, ‘perhaps someday I shall be fortunate enough to write something worthy of your playing’ which demonstrates his excitement and ambition as a playwright. But while he may have eventually reached the success he longed for, Vera would not be what afforded it.
Vera, set in modern Russia, is centred around a secret society of Nihilists’ attempts to destroy Russia’s corrupted government, their leader being a courageous heroine, Vera, who struggles to contain the passion and love within that nihilism forbids. In a predictable and melodramatic series of events, and through her faith in her lover and devotion to her country, Vera succeeds in restoring Russia to a benevolent and virtuous government — only at the tragic cost of her own life. Though dramas set in Russia were not uncommon at the time, no other play evoked so much empathy for the Nihists, who were held in the public eye as treacherous and vulgar. Due to this Vera was immediately disliked by most critics, being ridiculed by the New York Daily Tribune as ‘a fanciful, foolish, highly peppered story of love, intrigue and politics … overlaid with bantam gabble about the freedom of the people’ Wilde however asserted to Marie Prescott, the actress of the leading role (Pictured above) that ‘the play is not of politics, but of passion’, which suggests that he perhaps was interested in Nihilism only as a means to explore the suppression of passion and desire, and so did not intend to make a drastic political statement.
Regardless, Vera is undoubtedly a political play, to the degree that after the Czar of Russia was assassinated in 1881, Wilde was forced to postpone its production until 1883. Despite Vera inherently condemning the use of assassination and Nihlism itself, its interest in a cardinal desire for liberty that motivated the nihilists to assasinate the Czar in his play, rendered it culturally innaproppriate. … As well as being condemned as politically blasphemous, perhaps more crucially Vera was denoted as badly written and expressed. The Nihilist’s monologues expressing despair over Russia’s sickened condition and desire for freedom from persecution and injustice, were critiqued as particularly unsuccessfully emotive. In a play that desired to express human passion, it was perhaps a mistake to select an ideological group that contemporary audiences would systematically abhor, situated in a country whose hostile political climate evoked fear and discomfort. These tensions and anxieties perhaps rendered the audiences less able to empathise with and relate to the characters.
But it is also undoubtedly true that Vera is the work of a ‘a very young writer’, as he admitted himself to be in a letter to actress Clara Morris. Its writing style, intended to be fiery and passionate, is instead tediously melodramatic at times, the plot predictably orthodox, and the characters relatively two-dimensional in contrast to his later masterpieces. In consequence, Vera was dismissed by both contemporary and modern critics alike as of little literary importance, and after only a week of shows in August 1883, Vera’s production was cancelled, and was never performed again.
It is certainly a mistake to dismiss Vera as of no value, however, as despite being comparatively a failure, it is an interesting study of Wilde’s development both as a playwright and a philosopher. In Vera we see his first tentative explorations of ideologies and characters that took form and flourished in his later works, and to fully understand the ideas behind these later works, we must glimpse them in their primitive, experimental stages to observe their development. Furthermore, through understanding the aspects of Vera that rendered it so unpopular, we learn explicitly how his writing style needed to evolve, and how his radical ideas needed to be contained, for his later plays to be accepted in the public eye.
But it is also a mistake to dismiss Vera as an inherently bad play. It is inevitable that it has been overshadowed by his later success, and so has become deemed only valuable in how it demonstrates Wilde’s improvement. But if we only intend to view Vera using his later plays as a lens by which to value and interpret, then we do not do it justice. I intend to explore Vera both in how it demonstrates Wilde’s development as a writer, and as simply the play alone - as culturally defiant and rebellious, that despite being produced with inexperience, remains an insightful and ambitious first play.