Review: Archduke, Royal Court ★★★

Archduke, Royal Court: a striking premise that doesn’t quite DELIVEr

Belgrade, 1914: three hungry young men are promised a meal and a purpose, and the play asks us to believe this ordinary-seeming encounter will end an empire. Rajiv Joseph‘s play gets its UK premiere at the Royal Court, directed by Lyndsey Turner and designed by Es Devlin.

Walking into the space, a curving industrial underground tunnel stretches out and turns the corner to somewhere we cannot see. Devlin’s set has us wondering before the show even begins. Neil Austin‘s lighting earns its place too, adding to a sense of being in the gloom and then brightening strongly in later, more affluent, scenes.

The strongest writing comes early. Gavrilo (Stanley Morgan) and Nedeljko (Chris Walley) learn, within moments of each other, that their lungs have already decided their fate, and the exchange that reveals why a doomed nineteen year old might go looking for meaning. Their sense of despair at a shortened life is palpable, and it is plausible that they would want to seek some meaning in the last days.

Where things falls down is when we meet the Captain. Dragutin “Apis” Dimitrijević (Marc Wootton) is clearly intended as a Fagin figure, someone meant to pull vulnerable boys into his orbit. But the seduction never quite lands. He is written to be pompous and tedious rather than magnetic, closer to a pantomime villain than a credible manipulator. That matters here, because the whole fable depends on that pull being felt, as that is what explains why these young men will go on to assassinate Archduke Ferdinand.

The Captain has a habit of explaining things to these boys that they’d already know. He narrates the 1903 killing of King Alexander and Queen Draga, by then a well-known story in Serbian circles, as though breaking news. Later, a map talks the three of them through the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s reach over the region, information young men who’d grown up in Belgrade would hardly have needed spelling out. Both scenes feel like exposition addressed past the characters and out to the audience, which sits oddly next to a play so keen to make its politics feel lived-in rather than delivered.

Sladjana (Janice Connolly) is the only woman in the play. As a peasant-born cook working in a Belgrade household in 1914 she’s entirely plausible; rural to urban domestic migration was common enough. My issue isn’t her background, it’s how she’s characterised beyond it. The mystical framing and the crone-like staging under a cross is a leap from a period-plausible woman into folkloric archetype. Because she’s the only woman in the cast, this becomes the entirety of the play’s female presence. The men at least get some psychological interiority, uneven as it is. Sladjana gets symbolism instead.

There’s a difference between dramatic licence and rewriting what happened, and Joseph sometimes seems to stray into the second. The real Gavrilo Princip, Nedeljko Čabrinović and Trifko Grabež were self-radicalised idealists who went looking for a network to help them, not passive boys selected and converted by an outside figure. One detail worth checking for yourself: there was no direct rail line between Belgrade and Sarajevo in 1914, so the second-act train carriage, gorgeously opulent, is invented wholesale, standing in for what was actually a rough overland smuggling operation.

The one place the design does what the text can’t is the costume arc, ragged and gaunt at the start, well-dressed men by the second act (Evie Gurney). It’s a legible device for seduction through reward, even where the writing around the Captain doesn’t quite support it.

Exploring radicalisation of youth is an interesting and important premise and doing it through one of the most well-known assassinations in history is ambitious. It is a shame that the ambition does not quite land.

1903: King Alexander and Queen Draga of Serbia are murdered by army officers, including Dragutin Dimitrijević, in a coup that shocked Europe.
1908: Austria-Hungary formally annexes Bosnia and Herzegovina, inflaming Serbian nationalist anger.
1911: Dimitrijević founds Unification or Death, the secret society better known as the Black Hand.
1911–13: Gavrilo Princip, Nedeljko Čabrinović and Trifko Grabež, independently radicalised in Bosnian nationalist and Young Bosnia circles, are committed activists.
28 June 1914: Gavrilo Princip shoots Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo.
28 July 1914: Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia, one month later, triggering the alliance system that becomes the First World War.
2017: Rajiv Joseph‘s Archduke premieres in Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum.
November 2025: The play receives its Off-Broadway premiere with Roundabout Theatre Company.
20 June 2026: Archduke opens at the Royal Court for its European premiere.