George Airey as Alexis and Natasha Culzac as Vera in Third Thing Production’s Vera; or, The Nihilists. Image: Henry Roberts
Oscar Wilde’s first play, Vera, or, The Nihilists, was set to premiere in London on 17 December 1881, but the performance was cancelled by the novice playwright. Although the play was staged in New York in 1883, and has very occasionally been revived by students in the UK, US, and elsewhere, it has never been performed in London.
Until now.
On 16 September 2025 Third Thing Productions brought Vera to the Jack Studio Theatre in South London. The production stars Natasha Culzac as the eponymous Nihilist and is adapted and directed by Cecilia Thoden van Velzen.
I have a special interest in Vera because since 2020 I have been working on a book about the play. Oscar Wilde’s First Tragedy will be published in early 2026.
My review of the London revival will appear in the January 2026 issue of The Wildean. Below is an essay on the history of the play that I wrote for the show’s programme.
History of Vera; or, The Nihilists
Vera; or, The Nihilists, a tragedy set in tsarist Russia, was first staged in New York on a swelteringly hot August evening in 1883. For Oscar Wilde this was the culmination of a long- cherished dream. He had begun writing his first play three years prior, at the age of only twenty-five. Up until then, his literary output had consisted of a handful of unoriginal poems and two art reviews. Never one to settle for what he called ‘virtuous obscurity’, he resolved to embark on a theatrical career, thinking it the quickest route to fame.
He took inspiration from stories in the press about a mysterious cabal of Russian revolutionaries known as the Nihilists and their repeated attempts to assassinate the autocratic Tsar Alexander II. As a child he had been regaled by his mother, the nationalist poet Jane ‘Speranza’ Elgee, with stories of the ill-fated Irish uprising of 1848, and he seems to have detected parallels between the situations in Russia, Ireland, and France during the time of the revolution. For Wilde, freedom fighters – ‘These Christs that die upon the barricades’ – had their allure. But he also feared that demands for liberty could lead to violence. Mobs not only toppled tyrants but laid waste to culture. This was anathema to Wilde. In Vera he sought to dramatise the clash of opposing political ideologies. At the same time, he was anxious to point out that Russia was merely ‘the fiery and fervent background’ to his play, which was chiefly a transgressive love story about the daughter of an innkeeper falling for the heir to the Russian throne.
Wilde privately printed his script and distributed copies to superstar actresses such as Ellen Terry and Helena Modjeska. There were no takers. Running short of money, he despaired to a friend that ‘if no manager gives me gold for the Nihilists I don’t know what I shall do’. He arranged for a one-off performance in London but was obliged to cancel it, supposedly due to ‘the present state of political feeling in England’. In March 1881 the Nihilists had finally succeeding in killing the tsar with a nitro-glycerine bomb. Perhaps because the new tsarina was the sister-in-law of the Prince of Wales, or because the prince was such a strong supporter of London’s theatres, actors were unwilling to appear in a play about regicidal revolutionaries.
In the meantime Wilde had become a household name as a conspicuous adherent of ‘aestheticism’ – the philosophy of ‘art for art’s sake’ that had recently morphed into a proto youth culture. On the strength of his long hair and Byronic shirt collars, Wilde was invited to lecture on the craze in America. When his lectures and appearance were tittered at, he distracted himself by submitting his play to American theatre folk. He eventually found a willing collaborator in the Kentucky-born actress Marie Prescott.
Prescott had won a measure of success while supporting the renowned Italian actor Tommaso Salvini and hoped that Wilde’s play would launch her as a star in her own right. She and her husband ploughed about $9,000 into their production, probably the entirety of their savings. Prescott would not only star and co-produce but direct; Wilde designed the scenery and costumes. New York was plastered with lithographs of Wilde’s ‘vacant, moon face’ and of Prescott riding a sleigh while firing a rifle.
Before the curtain opened on the first night, the boys in the gallery began stamping their feet, whistling, and shouting Wilde’s name in mocking tones. The play’s prologue was well received, but during the first interval the troublemakers became more vociferous. ‘O, Oscar! Dear Oscar, come out!’ someone hollered. A journalist described the gallery as ‘like the crater of a volcano in ebullition’. The love scene in the final act was cause for further mirth. Wilde’s poetic dialogue was inadvertently humorous, while Prescott and her primary support, Lewis Morrison, were too enthusiastic in their embraces. ‘Ah! Kissee-kissee!’ and ‘Yum- yum’ came the cries from the gallery. A spirit of pandemonium infected the house and the play ‘proceeded to the finish with great embarrassment’.
After the 1892 premiere of Lady Windermere’s Fan, Wilde’s first theatrical hit, the author would give a self-aggrandising speech that has become the stuff of legend. He strutted onto the stage, cigarette in hand and green carnation on his lapel, and remarked to the audience that ‘I think that you have enjoyed the performance as much as I have, and I am pleased to believe that you like the piece almost as much as I do myself.’ In 1883, it was different. Nervously fiddling with his waistcoat, he thanked the playgoers for their ‘kindly reception’ of his play. Met with a barrage of ironic laughter, he retreated.
The next morning the short-tempered critics of New York eviscerated the play. The Tribune declared it ‘little better than fizzle’; the Herald, ‘long-drawn dramatic rot’; and the Times, ‘unreal, long-winded, and wearisome’. But many acknowledged that there was good material in the play, and that it had a chance of success if revised by someone with knowledge of stage requirements. Wilde accepted that changes were necessary but couldn’t bring himself to prune lines he thought beautiful; audiences stayed away. After only a week Prescott’s husband withdrew Vera, telling journalists that he could not afford to lose any more money.
Wilde returned to England and tried to forget the evening that he would describe as ‘the sharpest agony’ of his life and the play that had – albeit temporarily – ended his career as a dramatist. On trial at the Old Bailey in 1895 for ‘gross indecency’, he would testify under oath that Lady Windermere’s Fan was his first play.