The Golden Cockerel is a 1951 Australian radio play by Catherine Shepherd about Alexander Pushkin. It was one of a series of plays from Shepherd on writers.
The play was produced again in 1952, twice.
Reviewing the 1952 production, The Age said " it became tedious so that attention wandered long before its end. Nor did the prolonged and thoroughly artificial death scene at the end improve matters. Here was a story but the people in it never really came to life and the most important thing in any drama is that its characters shall live."
"Well-born, Pushkin is shown spend-ing a wild, brilliant youth. The play reveals his developing social conscience, how he sees, himself as a golden cockerel who warns the world of peril and crows for liberty. He is exiled, then he marries the empty-headed Natalia. It is through his love of her and his jealous suspicions that, instead of remaining a golden cockerel, he falls prey to vulgar passions and descends to the behaviour of a game-cock. "