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 is at least a kernel of truth in the dark comedy Joseph mines out of the fact that three goofballs and a batshit nationalist – all of them now largely forgotten by history – have no idea they’re about to destroy half the world.
But the real reason why Joseph has taken such liberties is that Archduke is clearly intended as a more broadly allegorical story, about how downtrodden innocents can be manipulated into acts of terrorist violence by older, more cynical political actors who see the youngsters as disposable. There is definitely more than a touch of Four Lions to the play, albeit pushed even further into absurdity.
It makes for an acerbic, often very funny comedy about the nature of terrorism and how the actual ‘martyrs’ – be they suicide bombers, incels, J6ers or indeed Serb nationalists – are invariably stooges in the great scheme of things. It’s also good at illustrating how misogyny is, at the very least, an undercurrent in terrorism. The only female character is Janice Connelly’s amusingly overbearing cook Sladjana, whose maternal interest in the boys is largely rebuffed. And in a rambling soliloquy to Trifco, Dragutin makes it clear that rank, sexist loathing of the erstwhile Serb queen motivated his killing of her over rational political calculus.
Running at two hours including an interval,it‘s a slightly odd length: it feels like Joseph has made his point within an hour or so and that it should have either been a splash shorter or instead attempted something a little more ambitious. But at the same time, Turner’s production - enhanced by a wonderful Es Devlin set that starts in the sewers and ends in a gilded train carriage - is simply so enjoyable that I didn’t mind it going around the houses a bit. A delicious cackle in the dark, at a subject that’s not becoming irrelevant anytime soon.
