Vera; or, The Nihilists

A draft of the script was completed in 1880 and the following year arrangements were made for a one-off staging in London with Mrs. Bernard-Beere in the title role, but the production was cancelled.

The first performance was in 1883 at New York’s Union Square Theatre, and was based on revisions made by Wilde while lecturing in America in 1882.

At the time of writing, the reform-minded Tsar Alexander II was involved in a struggle with revolutionaries who sought to assassinate him (and eventually succeeded).

In 1878, three years before the play's completion, Vera Zasulich shot the Governor of St Petersburg, Trepov.

Perzel told newspaper reporters that "the play is withdrawn simply because it did not pay," adding that he had lost $2,500 on the piece the previous week.

Soldiers, Conspirators, &c. Vera is a barmaid in her father's tavern, which is situated along a road to the prison camps in Siberia.

He begs her to go to Moscow and join the Nihilists, a terrorist group trying to assassinate the Czar, and avenge his imprisonment.

She must infiltrate the palace, stab the Tsar and throw the dagger out the window as a signal to Nihilist agents below.

Reviewing the first production, the New York Mirror described it as "among the highest order of plays," "masterly," and "the noblest contribution to its literature the stage has received in many years".