Stanley Morgan, Marc Wootton, Chris Walley. Photo by Helen Murray.

Archduke by Rajiv Joseph – Royal Court Theatre, London

Rajiv Joseph’s new play takes a moment that everyone knows, or thinks they do, and uses absurdist comedy to tease it apart. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 by Gavrilo Princip is widely understood as the trigger for the First World War. But the reasons it happened are obscured by subsequent events, and the actual events not particularly well know. In fact, they lend themselves to farce, which Joseph uses as an entry point into the minds of three young, desperate men. As well as Princip (Stanley Morgan), there is Nedeljko (Chris Walley) – both starving, tubercular, naïve and open to pretty much anything. Their meeting in a cave, where they have been summoned by a recruiter called Trifco (Abraham Popoola, although he was sick the night I saw the play and his part was impressively read by a member of the backstage team) is highly Beckettian – two men adrift in the world, with little understanding of what they are doing there. Joseph’s writing is funny and sharp, mixing surreal comedy with dark realism. Princip and Nedeljko are horrified to find they are ‘lungers’ – i.e. that they have TB – and still more so to discover that it kills you. Morgan and Walley put in excellent, wired performances.

The play becomes steadily stranger and, at times, hilarious, as the two would-be assassins meet their recruiter, a Slav nationalist called Dragutin, played in a entertainingly over-the-top manner by Marc Wootton. Dragutin is a a deranged fantasist, and a real-life Serb paramilitary who had previously massacred the Serb royal family before commissioned the murders and triggered global disaster. His housekeeper, Sladjana is played by Janice Connolly, who is both very funny in her obsession with food, shared by the starving young men, and her unexpected tenderness as she attempts to save them from their fates. Es Devlin’s dramatic set features a train carriage and a giant cake, as well as the final open-topped car in which the characters play out the killings, forseeing what will happen.

Lyndsey Turner’s direction balances the play’s tone very well, bringing the absurdity of world-shaping events to life. The assassination was almost accidental. The planned attempt had wounded those in the car behind, but Franz Joseph’s car happened to stop outside the car where Princip was consoling himself, on its way to visit the injured. Joseph (Rajiv, rather than Franz) emphasises the unlikely nature of the events that led a group of inconsequential nobodies to have such a terrible effect on so many, while also suggesting it would probably have happened anyway sooner or later. The idea that the First World War was caused indirectly by poverty and disease as much as anything else, is a valuable historical perspective, and Archduke is a smart, thoroughly enjoyable piece of theatre.