The young Oscar Wilde's Russian revolutionary drama reveals a playwright divided
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.
Yet, for all its obvious faults, the play has several points of interest and one is what it reveals about Wilde's own divided nature. We tend to think of that division in terms of his sexuality but there is a comparable split between his radical and aesthetic selves. The two achieve a perfect reconciliation in The Importance of Being Earnest which offers a running commentary on class, money, marriage, morals and the state of society while being an exquisite comic creation. But in an early work like Vera there is a deep, unhealed division between the earnest and the epigrammatic. The play is packed with diatribes against despotism and full of rhetorical hymns to liberty: at one point Vera apostrophises the concept as: 'O mighty mother of eternal time, thy robe is purple with the blood of those who have died for thee.'
But the play's most intriguing character is Prince Paul, the Russian prime minister, tsarist apologist and devious word-spinner. He talks throughout in chiselled phrases such as 'Experience, the name men give to their mistakes,' and suggests that there is a link between making a good salad and being a brilliant diplomat: the art in both cases is 'to know exactly how much oil one must put with one's vinegar'. He is the prototype of Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray and all those languid aristocrats who pepper Wilde's society dramas with their potted witticisms.
On the one hand, Wilde celebrates revolutionary ardour: on the other, a dandified cynic who claims 'life is much too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it'. But this conflict between ethics and aesthetics is not peculiar to Wilde. In 1885, Henry James pursued a similar bifurcation, admittedly with far more subtlety, in his novel The Princess Casamassima. Its hero, Hyacinth Robinson, is the illegitimate son of an English aristocrat and a French working-woman and his life is as divided as his name suggests. Through his meeting with the titular princess, he acquires a taste for the trappings of privilege. But he also has a passion for social justice that leads him to join a band of political conspirators very like those in Vera and to accept the duty of assassination.
James had no great sympathy for Wilde, and in 1895 shamefully refused to sign a petition calling for mitigation of his prison sentence. Yet the two writers had more in common than one suspects and in The Princess Casamassima you find a strange echo of the dilemma posed by Vera: how do you reconcile the desire to change the world with a delight in its culture; or, to put it more simply, how do you achieve a perfect balance between socialism and style?
Vera; or, The Nihilists is at Brockley Jack Studio theatre, London, 16-27 September.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Sun
29 minutes ago
- The Sun
My 5-year-old spent £2.2k on Amazon while the rest of us were sleeping – I'm stunned but trolls say it's all my fault
A MUM was left crying down the phone to Amazon after her five-year-old racked up a massive £2,200 shopping spree. Her son had caught hold of an old phone all while his parents were asleep. 2 2 Kirst McCall shared the eye-watering moment her cheeky tot splashed out on 31 items from her Amazon account. The video, which has since gone viral with over 3 million views on TikTok, shows Kirst's husband reprimand their child whilst she was crying on the phone to their bank, trying to claw back the cash. Posting under their family vlog account @kirstmccall, the mum captioned the now-infamous clip: 'I'm currently on the phone crying to Amazon – my husband is on the phone crying with our bank." The shopping list included seven ride-on toy cars, a host of random gadgets, and over £500-worth of extra goods still sitting in the cart ready to go when they caught him. The little lad had somehow managed to unlock Kirst's old mobile, open the Amazon app, and start ticking off his dream wishlist, all without anyone noticing. And while most parents would admit their kid has done something dodgy with their phone at some point, the internet wasn't having it. The clip was quickly flooded with brutal comments from trolls who blamed the parents for letting it happen in the first place. 'This is the parents' fault,' one blasted. 'Take accountability for leaving a phone lying around!' A third added: 'This is what happens when we no longer give kids the Toys R Us big toy catalogue' Others, though, were a bit more sympathetic, calling the situation a 'lesson learnt' for the whole family. One user wrote: 'Sometimes as parents, we don't realize the capabilities of our toddlers. "They use our phones for videos and we don't think, 'Hey, they can probably go on Amazon and buy stuff!'' One user clapped back at trolls saying the dad was too harsh, writing: 'What was he supposed to do, celebrate him?' Kirst later responded to the backlash, insisting they didn't just let it slide. The items are being returned, and the young shopaholic has been told in no uncertain terms that Amazon isn't a toy store. Some viewers also suggested Amazon should implement two-factor authentication for big purchases, especially with little fingers around. Whilst it was a stressful moment for the family, viewers appreciated the entertainment. One fan joked: "So sorry, this made my day haha". Another said: 'This kid's got better taste than I do, where do I sign up for his wishlist?' It seems this little one isn't the only one to go on an online shopping spree. A mum had previously issued a warning after her nine-year-old daughter spent over £1,000 on video game Roblox - unaware she was spending real money. Emma Bell didn't realise that her PayPal account was linked to her iPad and had no idea that her daughter could spend the money so easily. In the space of three months her daughter Bronwen made 25 transactions on her Roblox account - billing up more than £1,000 in her mum's bank account. The mum-of-three, from Quakers Yard, south Wales, has warned parents to be "vigilant" as she has been unable to get her money back. Roblox allows users to create their own games but also offers in-app purchases to upgrade the user's avatar with things like clothes or accessories and offers some pay-to-play games.
Daily Mail
38 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Gregg Wallace 'will take BBC to the cleaners for autism discrimination' as bosses in crisis talks over latest MasterChef series amid host's sex misconduct scandal
Gregg Wallace will take the BBC 'to the cleaners' for autism discrimination, friends claimed today. Supporters of the disgraced Masterchef star have said his neurodiversity is partly responsible for his inappropriate behaviour and revealed he feels unsupported by his former employer. It has even been claimed he cannot wear underpants because of his autism. He reportedly plans to sue the BBC and production company Banijay for alleged discrimination and has accused them of failing to provide enough support for his condition. The greengrocer turned presenter insists that his at-times off-colour jokes and 'banter' were a sign that his autism meant he 'didn't know what was right' to say in social situations. Wallace was fired from BBC MasterChef following a nine-month sexual misconduct investigation. BBC News reported that 50 more people had made fresh claims against him – including allegations he groped one MasterChef worker and on one occasion put a sock over his penis and opened his dressing room door shouting 'hooray'. But there has been some anger online from critics, including several people with autism, who have called him 'diabolically shameless' for claiming his neurodiversity is a contributing factor for his unacceptable behaviour. 'Gregg is guilty of bad jokes and rough humour. But so many people on the show talked openly about suspecting that he had autism for years before he got his diagnosis,' a friend of the star has said. The source told The Times: 'To sack him now when they were well aware of his condition is outrageous. He's going to take them to the cleaners'. The 60-year-old's condition has allegedly caused an 'inability to wear underwear because of his autistic hypersensitivity to labels and tight clothing'. The boss of a charity supporting victims of sexual abuse reacted with anger that his autism is partly responsible for his inappropriate behaviour. Duncan Craig OBE said: 'It's clear that Gregg Wallace is not ready to take accountability for his actions, instead blame his behaviour on autism 'As the CEO of a sexual harms charity, , and a survivor myself, I know survivors will be incensed by this gaslighting. I stand with you all'. Journalist and author Julie Bindel tweeted: 'I see Gregg Wallace is the latest misogynist to claim that 'neurodiversity' is the factor re his grotesque attitudes & behaviour. I can only imagine what those that actually do suffer from autism, etc must feel, or the parents raising autistic kids with zero support or empathy'. One teacher specialising in teaching children with autism said: 'In 17 years of teaching children with every sensory processing order you can imagine, I never met a child who couldn't wear underwear and if they did struggle they certainly were not wearing tight jeans. Stop using autism , as an excuse, Gregg Wallace'. But his friends insist that his autism is said to result in him having an 'oddity of filters and boundaries'. A source close to Wallace said the complaints against him were primarily related to language and most were before 2018, when he realised he had been behaving inappropriately. 'He stopped going out with the team and stopped telling jokes because he realised he didn't know what was right and what crossed the line,' a friend said. 'So many people on the show talked openly about suspecting that he had autism for years before he got his diagnosis,' a source said. It comes as an industry watchdog said Wallace's 'cheeky chappie' excuse for his sexual misconduct doesn't wash. The public did not see the former MasterChef host's 'uglier side', said Baroness Kennedy, who heads the Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority. On Tuesday the BBC received 50 new claims over Wallace, including that he groped a worker on the show. Wallace said the allegations are 'uncorroborated tittle-tattle'. Due to the BBC's cost-cutting measures, it's been deemed unlikely that Gregg will receive any or redundancy package, but he could land a six-figure payout from a tribunal in his favour. On Tuesday, Gregg released a statement ahead of the investigation into his misconduct allegations being published later this week. Wallace denies the claims and has condemned the corporation in a scathing social media post saying he had been cleared of 'the most serious and sensational accusations'. But fresh claims come from people who say they encountered him across a range of shows with the majority alleging he made inappropriate sexual comments towards them, according to BBC News. Writing on Instagram, Gregg said he had taken the decision to go public before the Silkins report was published as 'he cannot sit in silence while my reputation is further damaged' Out of the 50 allegations, 11 women have accused him of inappropriate sexual behaviour, such as groping and touching. The report is to be officially published on Thursday, but Wallace's legal team have claimed to have seen the report. A BBC spokesperson told MailOnline: 'Banijay UK instructed the law firm Lewis Silkin to run an investigation into allegations against Gregg Wallace. 'We are not going to comment until the investigation is complete and the findings are published.'
The Guardian
44 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Everybody's favourite manic pixie dream aunt: Celia Imrie's 20 best films – ranked!
Emma Thompson's Mary-Poppins-with-warts is a dog's dinner of a movie, but Celia Imrie amuses herself (and occasionally us) with a broader-than-usual turn as the widowed Mrs Quickly, who is pursuing a father of seven (Colin Firth) forced by his aunt to marry within 30 days or face penury. Imrie cites this as one of her favourite roles, despite having a live tarantula on her head in one scene and a wriggling worm in her mouth in another. Among Imrie's earliest credits was this exploitation horror about a secret, sadistic correctional institute for young women. Barely glimpsed amid the frenzy of whipping, she tries to alert the outside world by throwing a Bible from a window. 'Whenever I am in one of those awful out-of-the-frying-pan situations where you escape only to end up back where you started, I still use the phrase: 'How House of Whipcord!'' she recalled in her 2012 autobiography, The Happy Hoofer. A casting director spotted Imrie opposite Harold Pinter in his play The Hothouse and recommended her to George Lucas for the tiny role of the fighter pilot Bravo 5. She wore rust-coloured jodhpurs, but, on Lucas's orders and to her chagrin, no lipstick: 'I did my bit and fired my guns, but I haven't a notion what side I was on, who I was firing the guns at, who I was hitting and whether or not we won.' Nothing very much for Imrie to do as Una, the best chum of Bridget's mother, beyond presiding over the barbecue and offering to sieve the gravy, but she gets the occasional faux pas and adds generally to the impression of a high-calibre cast free of dead wood. She returned for extra helpings in the sequels. Feeling more like a victory lap than a fully fledged movie, this allows Imrie to reprise her sitcom role as Claudia Bing, the PR rival to Jennifer Saunders' Edina Monsoon. It is Claudia who blows the whistle after Edina apparently kills Kate Moss by knocking her into the Thames, and Claudia who prevents Jon Hamm from rushing valiantly to the model's aid. Imrie was kitted out in 'full rustic wench costume' for this time-travelling folkloric fantasy, but Christopher Lambert was too weedy to lift her on to his horse for the intended goodbye kiss. Instead, she simply grabs his calf and jogs beside him 'while delivering the dialogue that I should have been doing as we galloped along together'. There was more drama for her off-screen than on: she was briefly snatched from her hotel by a man who declared himself intent on continuing the Pictish tradition of kidnapping women. This The-Omen-meets-The-Da-Vinci-Code potboiler stars James D'Arcy as the cryptographer uncovering a plot to revive the antichrist. Po-faced Terence Stamp and Udo Kier have considerably less fun than Derek Jacobi, seen fleetingly as a librarian who brandishes a pair of cotton gloves and promises to check Isaac Newton's papers 'for stains and so on'. Imrie is the hero's mother, burnt to a crisp in only her second scene and squeezing out her final words in a high-pitched squeak. Most of the razzle-dazzle in this part prequel, part sequel comes courtesy of Cher, who makes her entrance by helicopter. But Imrie lets her hair down as the vice-chancellor of Oxford university on graduation day. Once Lily James, as the young version of Meryl Streep's character, Donna, has warbled her share of When I Kissed the Teacher and zoomed off across the quad, Imrie leaps from the stage trailing a canary-yellow feather boa and trilling: 'What a mad day!' In this London-set lesbian romcom, the newlywed Piper Perabo leaves her husband for the florist (Lena Headey) who supplied their wedding bouquets. As the bride's mother, Imrie nails the character in her haughty opening lines: 'Darling, tell your father he can't wear that suit … I've seen better dressed crab.' But there are nuanced delights to come, including the thawing of relations between Imrie and her husband (Anthony Head) during the sort of last-minute race through traffic that was compulsory in Britcoms of the Richard Curtis era. If there were ever a movie star in dire need of a spell at a Swiss spa resort, it's the sickly looking Dane DeHaan. In this horror inspired by Magic Mountain and Shutter Island, he is the executive sent to retrieve a colleague, only to find madness and murder afoot. Imrie, first seen doing a crossword with her fellow bathrobed guests, dispenses gobbets of backstory about the institute's sinister origins. With prim lips and loaded stares, she delivers her portentous dialogue with aplomb. 'There is a terrible darkness here,' she warns DeHaan. Next stop: the morgue. Emerging from the Cape Cod fog like a mermaid, Imrie plays one of the wacky catalysts for a disillusioned writer's journey of self-discovery, offering a slogan for every occasion: 'Who wants the burden of control?' 'If we can't show our feelings, we might as well be men!' She has a fine rapport with the film's lead, Karen Allen (of Raiders of the Lost Ark), but her character is essentially a manic pixie dream aunt who twirls coloured scarves, whoops among the waves and impishly ignores the 'Do Not Enter' signs around the lighthouse. Imagine Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe , but served as a side, not a main. With Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Bill Nighy and Tom Wilkinson, this Brits-in-India getaway is the Avengers Assemble of older British character actors. Imrie gets the slimmest pickings plot-wise, as the grandmother who opts for Jaipur rather than an eternity of babysitting. She packs her shrewd smirk and that reliable libido (on securing an airline upgrade: 'I had to flirt so hard with the travel agent it was practically phone sex') and gets several other choice lines, complaining about getting old ('I don't want to be the first person they let off the plane in a hostage crisis') and offering terse advice on how the unhappily married Nighy could celebrate his 40th wedding anniversary ('Perhaps a minute's silence?'). A 2015 sequel offered her character a glimmer of romance. Or Outnumbered: The Movie. The writer-directors Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin preserve the partly improvised nature of their kids-say-the-darnedest-things sitcom while replacing its stars, Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner, with David Tennant and Rosamund Pike. The 'sit' in this 'com' is the birthday party of their dying grandpa (Billy Connolly). After he expires on the beach in the company of the children, Imrie is called in from the child welfare unit. Reacting with understated incredulity to the kids' tales of Viking funerals and the Norse god Odin, she rounds up their crayon drawings as evidence. Mary Norton's adventure novel about a tiny resourceful family who live in the skirting boards and hide from 'human beans' has been the source of numerous adaptations, including Studio Ghibli's Arrietty in 2010. This inventive British version, with Imrie and Jim Broadbent delightful as the parents and John Goodman in full panto mode as the hissable developer threatening their home, is a charmer. Gemma Jackson's production design is a special highlight. 'It was fabulous walking around the gigantic chair and table legs and sitting on huge cotton reels,' said Imrie. In a structurally daring biopic scripted by Frank Cottrell Boyce and carved into two contrasting perspectives, Imrie plays the tenacious mother of the cellist Jacqueline du Pré (Emily Watson), encouraging competition with her sister Hilary (Rachel Griffiths). 'If you want to be together, you've got to be as good as each other,' she insists, establishing a pattern of rivalry that splashes over into their love lives. In her early scenes as the grieving mother Mimi, Imrie makes you realise that, with the help of some heavyweight roles, she could have approached the gravitas of her pal Glenda Jackson (she was Goneril to Jackson's Lear in 2016). Just look at her deep grooves of experience and regret, her instant access to purse-lipped froideur. That dissipates as Mimi helps to launch the west London patisserie her late daughter never got the chance to open and tensions vanish beneath a dusting of feelgood whimsy thicker than several inches of icing sugar. But Imrie is highly watchable in her flirtations with the neighbourhood inventor (Bill Paterson), whom she invites up for coffee. If it isn't decaf, he says, he'll be 'up all night'. Cue the naughty Imrie twinkle: 'Lucky me.' This haunted-house horror stars Florence Pugh and Ben Lloyd-Hughes as bogus ghostbusters hired to rid a country mansion of the screams of the wee poppets who were murdered there. Imrie was their foster mother, her son the killer, so it's no surprise when she announces that the brats had it coming. What is striking is how she maintains her cool, and keeps the volume down, even once she turns torture-porn-style aggressor. 'It's quiet time now,' she whispers, approaching her victim's mouth with a needle and thread. It all goes a bit wild after she whips the hacksaw out. Time has been kind to this factually inspired Britcom about the Women's Institute members – played by stars including Helen Mirren, Julie Walters and Linda Bassett – who strip for a charity calendar, ruffling feathers but raising enough to fund an entire leukaemia ward at their local hospital. Eventually, they end up in Hollywood, hob-nobbing with Jay Leno and the thrash metal band Anthrax, of all people. Imrie gives lots of comic side-eye as she works out with a hot young trainer in preparation for the big shoot; she is the only one to express disappointment that her breasts will be tastefully concealed in the final product. 'Yours good, are they?' asks Mirren, to which she coolly replies: 'They're tremendous.' Accept no Imrie-tations. Imelda Staunton is the hoity-toity snob ('Lady Nevershit', as she is referred to) who flees her cheating husband and moves in with her wild-swimming, dope-smoking, bisexual sister, Bif (Imrie), in the latter's council flat, as well as joining her and classmates Timothy Spall and Joanna Lumley at the local dance group. Imrie is in free spirit mode again, but more complex here than in Year By the Sea – although, weirdly, both films show her boogieing to the Big Bopper's Chantilly Lace. Until cancer puts paid to her Extinction Rebellion vim, she exudes sexual swagger. 'Thirty minutes and I'll be good to go,' says her date, waggling a blister pack of Viagra. 'I'll get you there in 10,' she grins. The only feature to be directed by the Orkney-based poet and film-maker Margaret Tait gave Imrie an early dramatic lead. She plays Barbara, a discontented photographer puzzling over the life and death of her mother, who drowned years earlier. Was it sleepwalking or suicide? Sifting episodes from her own and her mother's childhood, Barbara dreams of flying, wrestles with guilt ('I should have been able to stop her, or save her') and spars with her own lover, played by the perpetually sanguine Jack Shepherd. This gives Imrie room to exhibit her brittle, indignant intelligence and to sigh an awful lot. With her faintly formidable air, it's easy to imagine she could have become the next Charlotte Rampling.
