Most of us have written an essay on the origins of the first world war, exam-cramming the names of Bosnian Serb teenager Gavrilo Princip and his victims – Austrian-Hungarian heir Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie – in Sarajevo almost exactly 112 years ago. A textbook answer is that their assassinations militarised Europe.
However, a student who answered a question on the origins of the 1914-18 conflict with the farcical speculation in Rajiv Joseph’s 2025 play Archduke might face a retake. Unemployed and diagnosed as a “lunger” (consumptive), Princip (Stanley Morgan) receives a “job” offer from Apis (Marc Wootton), a Slav nationalist who recruits Gavrilo and two other starving sick youths, Trifco (Abraham Popoola) and Nedeljko (Chris Walley), by filling their minds with a rant on historical wrongs and their bellies with the menus of his devout housekeeper, Sladjana (Janice Connolly). The lungers’ hunger is a major motivation, a recurring metaphor involving fancy sandwiches.
Some details Google but dramatic elements such as a spectacular gateau, a theology of feline evil and a medical teaching skeleton are likely down to the writer. His speciality is illuminatingly oblique historical perspectives. Guards at the Taj has two mid-17th century Indian soldiers watching the first sunrise over what is now the Unesco world heritage site of the Taj Mahal. Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, belatedly seen at the Young Vic last year, addressed the 2003 Iraq war via the eyes of the ghost of a dead big cat in captivity in the Iraqi tourist attraction.
This tactic addresses urgent current concerns – imperialism, colonialism, militarism – without topical and geographical sensitivities. In Archduke, the radicalisation of young men through economic insecurity, historical grievance and religious fervour can be considered at protected but not obscuring distance. TB is a metaphor for a generation’s loss of future and these terrorists are fervent Eastern Christians: Gavrilo was named after the Angel Gabriel and murders for “Mother Mary”.
Director Lyndsey Turner recently balanced historical comedy and high seriousness in Ava Pickett’s 1536 and again inflects a convincing then with nuances of now. Designer Es Devlin interprets the main set direction “An abandoned warehouse” as a railway tunnel vault. This may allude to the historian Professor AJP Taylor’s theory that a cause of the first world war was rigid train timetables – making troop movements hard to reverse – but also facilitates the final scene in which the conspirators board a train to Sarajevo. Or should make it easy: on press night, the carriage door wouldn’t open from outside, requiring the actors to use nifty footwork via the wings.
The cast negotiates just as well the tragicomic tone. A haunting final scene asks what if Princip had ducked his mission. He would presumably not now be buried in Sarajevo’s Heroes Chapel and a Glaswegian rock band would not be called Franz Ferdinand. Although, one of the play’s points, might the first global conflict just have slightly different dates?
Don’t risk this version of history in an exam hall. But theatrically Joseph’s thesis graduates with high honours.
