Royal Court Theatre

If you’re in the market for a meticulously accurate, 100 percent culturally sensitive drama about the events that led to the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand… then approach US playwright Rajiv Joseph’s play with caution. Indeed, I spent the first half hour or so of Lyndsey Turner’s UK premiere slightly distracted by imagining the probable reaction of a Serbian friend of mine.  That’s not to say Joseph hasn’t done his research. His absurdist account of the recruitment and radicalisation of Ferdinand’s would-be assassins in the name of Yugoslav nationalism is very, very obviously not how it went down exactly. But this pointedly surreal play never pretends otherwise,and it has a spine of fact, particularly in its darkly comic but relatively illuminating depiction of Dragutin Dimitrijević, the Serb nationalist paramilitary who’d led the massacre of the country’s royal family in 1903 and who is widely held to have orchestrated – or at least enabled – the murder that triggered the First World War.  Were the assassins really the gormless, ideology-free naïfs that we see in Gavrilo (Stanley Morgan), Trifko (Abraham Popoola) and Nedeljko (Chris Walley) - sweet young men with no interest in Balkan politics at all, who Marc Wootton’s bonkers Dragutin grooms into enacting his plans? All evidence says no, although at the same time there’s no question that they were disaffected teenagers, not hardened soldiers. It is also clear that they had strictly regional ambitions and...

There are lots of highlights to the Royal Court’s seventieth anniversary season. But where the Gary Oldman-starring production of Krapp’s Last Tape and the hit Broadway play John Proctor is the Villain would have been expected to come to London eventually, Man to Man is altogether more of a surprise. Manfred Karge’s hallucinatory solo play about a widow who assumes her late husband’s job and identity in inter-war Germany had its UK premiere at Edinburgh Traverse Theatre in 1987 before transferring to the Court the following year. Stephen Unwin’s production provided a breakthrough for an androgynous young actor named Tilda Swinton, starting her down the path to global cult fame.  Now, in a similar way to the Court’s 2025 revival of 4.48 Psychosis, the whole band is back together for a revival of Man to Man once again starring Swinton and directed by Unwin. Although Swinton has starred in the odd stage role in Europe since, she’s not performed in the UK for over three decades, and who knows if she’ll do so again.