Archduke

There is, of course, only one Archduke anyone has ever heard of, and that’s our boy Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Emipre whose assassination in 1914 was the spark that lit Europe and caused the carnage of the Great War. US playwright Rajiv Joseph – best known here for his plays Guards at the Taj and Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo – wrote his darkly comic drama about Ferdinand’s assassins a few years back, and now it makes its UK debut at the Royal Court as part of its 70th anniversary season. The fine cast of Chris Walley, Abraham Popoola, Stanley Morgan, Janice Connolly and Marc Wootton is directed by the great Lyndsey Turner, with design from the legendary Es Devlin.