The Archduke Review – Twisted History Goes to War for a Sandwich | stage

MMost of us have written an essay on the origins of World War I, filling in the names of Bosnian Serb teenager Gavrilo Princip and his victims – Austro-Hungarian heir Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie – in Sarajevo some 112 years ago. The typical answer is that their assassinations led to the militarization of Europe.

However, a student who answers a question about the origins of the 1914-1918 conflict with farcical speculation in Rajiv Joseph’s 2025 play The Archduke may face reconsideration. Princip (Stanley Morgan), unemployed and diagnosed as “expendable,” receives a job offer from Apis (Mark Wootton), a Slavic nationalist who recruits Gavrilo and two other sick, starving young men, Trevko (Abraham Popoola) and Nedeljko (Chris Whaley), by filling their minds with rants about historical inaccuracies and their bellies with the lists of his pious housekeeper, Sladijana. (Janice Connolly). The hunger of the beggars is a major motive, and is a recurring metaphor that includes luxury sandwiches.

Google some details but dramatic elements such as the amazing Gato, the theology of feline evil and the skeleton of medical education are likely to go back to the writer. His specialty is illuminatingly oblique historical perspectives. The Taj Mahal guards have two mid-17th century Indian soldiers watching the first sunrise over what is now the UNESCO World Heritage Site Taj Mahal. The Baghdad Zoo’s Bengal Tiger, seen late at the Young Vic last year, looked at the 2003 Iraq War through the eyes of the ghost of a big cat dead in captivity at an Iraqi tourist attraction.

This tactic addresses pressing current concerns – imperialism, colonialism, militarism – without substantive and geographical sensitivities. In The Archduke’s book, the radicalization of youth through economic insecurity, historical grievances, and religious fervor can be viewed at a protected but not ambiguous distance. Tuberculosis is a metaphor for the loss of a generation to the future and these terrorists are ardent Eastern Christians: Gavrilo is named after the angel Gabriel and commits murders because of “Mother Mary.”

Director Lindsay Turner recently balanced historical comedy with high seriousness in Ava Beckett’s 1536, once again bringing a compelling feel of the time with present-day nuances. Designer Es Devlin interprets the main direction “Abandoned Warehouse” as the basement of a railway tunnel. This may refer to historian Professor A. J. P. Taylor’s theory that the cause of the First World War was strict train timetables – making it difficult to reverse troop movements – but it also facilitates the final scene in which the conspirators board the train to Sarajevo. Or we should make it easy: On press night, the carriage door won’t open from the outside, requiring the actors to use elegant footwork across the wings.

The cast also negotiates the tragic tone. A haunting final scene questions whether Princip has evaded his mission. Presumably he will now not be buried in the Heroes’ Church in Sarajevo and the Glasgow rock band will no longer be named Franz Ferdinand. Although one of the points of the play is, could the first world conflict have had slightly different histories?

Don’t risk this version of history in the exam hall. But from a theatrical standpoint, Joseph’s thesis graduated with high honors.