The Bronze Horseman

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The Bronze Horseman is one of the most important and influential poems of world literature, a 19th Century Russian masterpiece. The central theme of this great poem - the conflict between state power and the individual - is as urgent and resonant as ever today. Poet Michael Symmons Roberts has brought The Bronze Horseman to life in a fresh new translation. The linking narrative explores Pushkin's own parallel struggles with state power as his wife - amid rumours of infidelity - gets drawn further and further into Tsar Nicholas's social circle and the poet, suspected of sedition, finds his epic,The Bronze Horseman, censored and ultimately banned from publication. Pushkin's symbolic evocation of the battle between Tsar and citizen, the powerless and the powerful, has real currency for now. In its interweaving of his great poem with the drama and politics of his own life in the 1830s, this play raises questions about power, class, nationalism, racism and identity. Both narratives - the story of the poem and the story of its censorship - speak to urgent contemporary debates about the conflict between state power and individual freedom. Pushkin's poem on the page is vibrant, furious and alive with the sound of the city; the rush of the river Neva rising; waves, floods, torrential rain, water gushing into cellars as citizens run or swim, struggling to escape the rising waters; boats picked up by the storm and smashed into houses; bridges breached and shattered, and the iconic, macabre chase, when the bronze statue of Peter the Great comes to life, clattering and baying through the streets of St Petersburg in pursuit of the desperate outcast Yevgeny. Pushkin - Max Irons Sergey/ Evgeny - Tachia Newall Anna - Deborah McAndrew Parasha - Verity-May Henry BBC North production directed by Susan Roberts