Review at a glance
Hands up if you know who Gavrilo Princip is? The young Serb activist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo in 1914 at the age of 19, triggering the First World War.
Gavrilo and his equally child-like comrades Trifko and Nedeljko, all of them starving virgin consumptives, are the subjects of American writer Rajiv Joseph’s dream-like, absurdist comedy. This 2017 work from the Pulitzer-nominated creator of Bengal Tiger in the Baghdad Zoo casts an amused eye over the radicalisation of hopeless young men and ends with a whimsical “what if?”
Supposing these boys sacked off the murder and went and had a sandwich instead - maybe even met some women. Well, yeah. You could apply that sort of airy speculation to any historical narrative, pretty much. The play seems oddly insubstantial given the subject matter, though it’s enjoyable enough in Lyndsey Turner’s production.
The boys’ recruitment is larded with superstition and bolstered by the showboating nationalism of the mysterious, ringmaster-like Captain. There are amusing, deliberately overblown performances throughout.
Archduke also has one of the best sets in ages, by the great Es Devlin: a segmented, curving tunnel on which Third Man-style shadows loom, and into which a section of an ornate railway carriage is eventually trundled. There’s also evocative fairground music for dulcimer and hurdy-gurdy, heightening the nightmare mood.
Stanley Morgan’s boyish, blokeish Gavrilo, named for the archangel Gabriel, is first to stumble into the tunnel. He’s been sent by the doctor who diagnosed his terminal tuberculosis to meet a man who will give him “purpose in life”, what’s left of it.
ArchdukeHelen MurrayChris Walley’s Irish-accented Nedeljko joins him, with the same story and the same life-shortening lung condition. They’re hungry, motherless, empty vessels, but Abraham Popoola’s big-talking Trifko fails to inspire or intimidate them, even when he shows them his handmade bomb.
That’s left to Marc Wootton’s Captain Dragutin Dimitrijevic, a fruity and extravagant figure with sculpted hair and beard and a theatrical uniform. He’s a bit like Withnail’s Uncle Monty, got up as a chocolate soldier.
Nonetheless he bamboozles the boys with tales of the obscene decadence of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and an account of the time he disembowelled the traitor Serb king and his wife. They are further won over with feasts conjured by his aged cook Sladjana (Janice Connolly), who may be a wise crone trying to divert them from their murderous course, or a witch. At one point she feeds them cherries in brandy which may or may not actually be kitten livers.
The play has an odd attitude to women: Gavrilo and Nedeljko idolise their absent mothers and are half-fascinated, half-fearful about sex (they’re more enthusiastic about Sarajevo’s sandwiches than its brothels). The idea of the woman’s skeleton in their doctor’s office gives them the heebie-jeebies and they’re terrified of a witch “entering” them. The Captain’s graphic descriptions of mutilation have a grotesque sexual edge.
The suggestion seems to be that terrorism and other manifestations of toxic masculinity could be solved with a good shag. I can’t help feeling there’s more to it than that, and more to the lure of nativism than the captain’s frothing prejudices.
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His rhetoric is ornate, almost poetic, where the young men’s speech is blunt and unrooted in the period. Turner’s production has the restless energy of REM sleep, where strange symbols occur: a dagger, a giant cake, a sweaty sackful of roots, fats and snacks. The Captain makes much of having a “consecrated chapel” – suggesting God is on the Serbian side - but at one point seems literally to emit sulphur.
Maybe it’s a mistake to take Archduke too seriously. Maybe it’s just a comedy about three young idiots who lit the touchpaper of 20th century conflict in the belief they’d be remembered. And yes, maybe the course of history and all our lives would have been different if they hadn’t.
To 25 Jul, royalcourttheatre.com