ajhlovestheatre

ARCHDUKE

by Rajiv Joseph

directed by Lyndsey Turner 

Royal Court Theatre, London – until 25 July 2026

running time: 2 hours including interval

https://royalcourttheatre.com/events/archduke/

Rajiv Joseph’s rollicking, troubling dark comedy only premiered off-Broadway late last year, so this must be one of the most speedy theatrical transatlantic crossings in recent memory. It’s not hard to see why; despite its theme and setting (it’s a surreal revisionist take on the run-up to the assassination in 1914 Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an event that precipitated WW1), Archduke has an unmistakable urgency and relevance to right now. 

Lyndsey Turner’s gruesomely magical production for the Royal Court is not a replica of the Roundabout Theatre version that New Yorkers enjoyed last year and it is quite a treat, if you’ve got a strong enough stomach. There are echoes of Beckett, Orton, Stoppard and Peter Barnes (fittingly, all writers who have had work produced at the Court) in Joseph’s script, as history, absurdity and bonkers swirl headily together. He plays fast and loose with the historical facts but has a masterly command of macabre, gleeful humour and meatily vivid language. 

Joseph sees, in this tale of three apparently expendable young men with hopeless futures and scant critical thinking skills recruited to carry out a political assassination that will have global repercussions, a metaphor for similarly impressionable people in the present day being groomed and indoctrinated into extremist organisations. (“It’s not your fault you’re choking!..You could have had a life, but now you don’t… someone took your life away from you, son! Someone took it all away. How’s that make you feel?”) He doesn’t belabour the point, couching it in salty dialogue and a gallery of characters ranging from the endearing (if morally questionable) to the downright terrifying.

Stanley Morgan and Chris Walley make a delightful tragicomic double act as Gavrilo and Nedeljko, their youthful lives blighted by malnutrition and tuberculosis, but both possessed of a stubborn vitality that makes you care from the outset. There are shades of a young Vladimir and Estragon, only much funnier, in their naive, periodically aggressive ramblings. They’re joined by Abraham Popoola’s winningly disdainful Trifko, who initially imagines himself their superior but eventually realises he too is a pawn in somebody else’s game. 

The principal player of said game is Serbian army officer and Black Hand gang leader Dragutin ‘Apis’ Dimitrijevic, an actual historical figure manifested here as a rampant comic-horror turn, equal parts bluster, bile and brutality. He brags, with nauseating explicitness, about his murder of the late Serbian King and Queen, and the bullets embedded in his body like a badge of honour beneath his lavishly brocaded uniform (excellent costumes by Evie Gurney). Marc Wootton delivers a brilliant, unsettling tour de force as this reprehensible, vain but fascinating bully, relishing the extravagant speechifying, and the malignant control he exerts over everybody else. Apis comes armed with his loquacious cook (a gloriously deranged Janice Connolly), hell bent on feeding the boys up but complicit and deadly beneath all the surface cosiness. Cherries in brandy are not exactly a common delicacy but I doubt they’ll be on anybody’s menu after watching Archduke…

The tone throughout is of quirky comic lunacy with a constant undertow of simmering threat. Joseph doesn’t overemphasise the parallels between Middle Europe in the early twentieth century and now, but he doesn’t need to. The message that hopeless people can be coerced into doing desperate things registers potently through the ages. The violence, when it comes, has a wild cartoonish edge (outstanding fight direction by Sam Lyon-Behan) but not without acknowledging the excruciating pain being inflicted. 

Designer Es Devlin sets the whole thing in what appears to be a satisfyingly well ordered railway tunnel, murky-dark and snaking just around a corner that we can’t see.  The dark cylindrical void is filled for the final scene with a sumptuous train carriage, carrying Gavrilo, Nedeljko and Trifko to Sarajevo as they head off to alter the course of world history, followed by their prescribed suicides (“it’s not a suicide…so much…but rather an embracing of Serbian National Pride” as Apis helpfully points out). Devlin’s work here is a gorgeous feat of stage design, complemented by lighting by Neil Austin that gives us just enough illumination to see what’s going on, but not sufficient that we can begin to work out how Skylar Fox’s understated but impressive tricks and illusions are effected. The whole production has bags of atmosphere.

For all its cleverness and sinister humour, Archduke ultimately feels slightly less than the sum of its parts. It somewhat runs out of dramatic and comic steam a little before the end, something that not even Turner’s well nigh flawless staging can disguise. It’s a richly enjoyable, thought-provoking evening though, and more accessible than the same writer’s Bengal Tiger At Baghdad Zoo, seen late last year at the Young Vic. If your sense of humour tends towards the gallows, you’ll find a lot to enjoy here.