“Archduke” at Royal Court Theatre Downstairs
Jeremy Malies in West London
★☆☆☆☆
29 June 2026
Rajiv Joseph’s script gives the background to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in June 1914, an action that caused the First World War and resulted in the deaths of between 15 and 22 million people. Joseph chooses to deal with the event by writing a piece of absurdism.
Chris Walley (foreground) and Henry Morgan.
Photo credit: Helen Murray.
This is of course a potentially powerful way of dealing with a world crisis; absurdism can be effective in exposing irrationality and lack of meaning, the most notable example being Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui which satirizes the rise of Hitler.
But Joseph’s play is an inept form of absurdism with little rigour or conceptual truth. The author (he has also written Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo) lacks the discipline or craft to keep the basics of his characters uniform through the plot even though it deals with documented events.
Presentation of the eventual assassin, Gavrilo Princip (played by Stanley Morgan), is so inconsistent that the character lurches from a simpleton who mangles basic grammar and tenses to an inspiring figure who can exploit rhetoric to speak figuratively about posterity at the close.
It’s beyond me how director Lyndsey Turner (she currently has Ava Pickett’s eminently logical 1536 running in the West End) manages to navigate any sort of route for the performers.
Morgan is joined by two fellow conspirators (played by Abraham Popoola and Chris Walley) with the trio being motivated and supplied with weapons by former Serbian army officer Dragutin Dimitrijević played by Marc Wootton.
The young men are all tubercular; they speak of being deprived of their futures so creating an overarching metaphor for the generation from both sides that would be slaughtered on the Somme, in Flanders fields, Gallipoli, and the Italian Alps.
Photo credit: Helen Murray
Within 20 seconds of the action starting there is a pratfall involving collapsing crates. Physical comedy so early on struck me as unnecessary and distracting, but an audience who appeared ready to laugh at anything reacted as though Keaton and Chaplin had been reincarnated in front of us.
If Joseph is to have Princip looking forward to how history will treat him it might have been useful to hear just a snippet from his trial evidence when he proved articulate, free of ethnic or sectarian prejudice, and well informed about the loose revolutionary nature of his movement, Young Bosnia.
Princip was a Yugoslav nationalist but at no time does the play, even subliminally, look forward to the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s which might have broadened the context. Princip was remorseful about his accidental shooting of the aristocratic but certainly not royal Sophie Chotek who was sitting next to her husband. (Joseph does at least touch on the fact that the marriage was morganatic and a love match.)
Early sets from Es Devlin are restrained: a shadowy warehouse, Dimitrijević’s study, and the crypt of an Eastern Orthodox Church. The final set is truly impressive and quite a transformation as the trio of assassins boards the sleeping car train to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo from their boot camp in Belgrade. The luxurious carriage is closely observed, and the youngsters’ wonder at it all is truly earned. A hiccup on press night meant that the carriage door would not open and the actors finally traipsed on from the side. They are now out of their drab overalls, and costume designer Evie Gurney has them resplendent in check and plaid three-piece lounge suits. Morgan looks remarkably like the one picture we have of Princip after his imprisonment.
Yes, it’s absurdism but even with that as his genre, Joseph might have played with the contradictions between the brutality of Princip’s actions and the candour, thoroughness, and sincerity of his trial testimony not to mention the breadth of his reading. The presentation of Princip as a clot is lazy. Absurdism does not mean that intelligent historical characters need to be presented as fools.
And while we are on the subject of absurdism and assassins, could Joseph not have learned from Sondheim and Weidman in their Assassins which also defies logic and relies on repeated motifs but manages to explore ideas of violence, fame, and history?
A highlight comes in an engaging set piece as Wootton unfurls a map of the Balkans. With a relish for history and trilled consonants, he gives us a detailed run-through of recent events in Serbia and the excesses of Austro-Hungarian hegemony. It’s sub-Brechtian I suppose but even this palls.
Working with almost no resources, let alone those of the Royal Court and a director of the stature of Turner, Oliver Yellop has already brought Princip memorably to life at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The current project was a rerun of history too far for me. And I don’t understand why Turner would want to be associated with writing of this calibre.
A repeated motif here is … sandwiches. It’s a limp gag that requires you to know that Princip had just bought a sandwich when the archduke’s limousine hove into view unexpectedly at point-blank range. I was in Sarajevo last autumn and quizzed a tobacconist situated on the relevant street corner. He understandably claimed to be on the exact site which he said was once a delicatessen. We discussed the neatness of Princip’s Browning revolver.
Neil Austin’s lighting has a huge fluorescent white hoop dominate the front of the stage. It serves to suggest a railway tunnel and perhaps the arc of history, but it is in the area of historical perspective that the script falls short and proves myopic. The play does nothing to help me reinterpret events, and I contend that it will have done little to make anybody in the audience ponder the run-up to the Great War and its literal trigger. Archduke is poor stuff across the board.
