A rehearsed reading of Pushkin's play 'The Feast During the Plague', with an introduction by translator Antony Wood

On 9 June, the Pushkin Club gave us a glimpse of some of the masterpieces Pushkin wrote at the end of 1830 in three months of quarantine during a pandemic of Asiatic cholera, among them excerpts from the Little Tragedy A Feast during the Plague. Now, this event offers a rare chance to hear a rehearsed reading of this extraordinary piece by five actors, complete in a translation by Antony Wood.

The translator will first give a short introductory talk. This will be followed, as an overture to the reading, by an arrangement of Shostakovich's brief piece Galop, played by Julian Milone (violin) and Nadia Giliova (piano). Members of the Pushkin Club (see Cast below) will then read A Feast during the Plague, following which Alla Gelich will read excerpts from it in the original Russian, and finally, so as to end the event on a high note, Pushkin’s poem 'Вакхическая песня' (‘Bacchic Song’) in English and Russian.

A Feast during the Plague is Pushkin's free translation of part of a scene from a long blank verse melodrama by the Scottish writer John Wilson set in London during the Great Plague of 1665–66, first published in 1816. Pushkin read the original, and takes on Wilson's setting, the characters being young naval officers of the English fleet on shore leave from the Dutch wars. Out of this fragment Pushkin miraculously creates a dramatic piece complete in itself.

Conflicts in Pushkin's personal life as he is cut off alone on the eve of his marriage beset by the frustrations of quarantine fuel the dynamics of this piece. His letters of the period, besides rational and perceptive ideas on preventive measures against infection, express combative attitudes to the epidemic springing from his fearlessness, sans-souci and restless energy.

Pushkin's chosen fragment contains an already extreme situation full of stark clashes, to which he gives definitive shape in two original poems replacing Wilson's words for two 'songs', from a lady of the town and the Master of Revels. The latter, hymning the exultation of living dangerously, fascinated Marina Tsvetaeva, for whom it expressed ‘Bliss of complete surrender to the elemental. Bliss, with no equal in all the world’s poetry’. But with the intervention of a Priest Pushkin also presents a strong moral counter-force to the revellers, and the balance is pregnantly poised at the end.

Tickets are £5, and are being sold via Eventbrite

CAST in order of appearance

Young Man - David Brummell

Master of Revels - Adrian Kealey

Mary - Lucy Daniels

Louisa - Penelope Dimond

Priest - Rick Pulford

Violin - Julian Milone

Piano - Nadia Giliova

Reader in original - Alla Gelich

Direction - Antony Wood

Antony Wood's translations of Pushkin's lyric and narrative poetry have recently been published as SELECTED POETRY in Penguin Classics