FringeReview UK 2026
Archduke
Royal Court
Genre: American Theater, Comedy, Costume, Drama, Historical, Mainstream Theatre, Political, Theatre
Venue: Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Anyone who saw Rajiv Joseph’s 2015 Guards at the Taj revived at the Orange Tree nine years later, might guess a little of what Joseph’s Archduke portends. Written on the heels of Guards, in 2017, its British premiere at the Royal Court Upstairs is directed by Lyndsey Turner till July 25.
High entertainment for the theatre’s blazing midsummer.
Review
“The Hapsburg Empire! Shameful in scope, pornographic in nature.” That’s a way of putting it. Anyone who saw Rajiv Joseph’s 2015 Guards at the Taj revived at the Orange Tree nine years later, might guess a little of what Joseph’s Archduke portends. Written on the heels of Guards, in 2017, its British premiere at the Royal Court Upstairs is directed by Lyndsey Turner till July 25.
“Disgusting” the Captain continues to his three raw recruits about a truncated Austria-Hungary after its defeat by Prussia. “A twisted Siamese piglet, forever defecating into the mouth of its unfortunate twin.”
It’s not all figurative, coming in a slab of history lesson – a style that might be seriously out of kilter with the rest of the play’s aesthetic if it had a style. As it is, there’s several colliding like dodgems. I don’t know what the original production looked like: but his scene features a drop-down map seemingly straight out of Operation Mincemeat executed (as it were) by the Ministry of Silly Walks (military division and mostly sitting down). But most of it is realised as history revisited as farce. What might irritate some is the way Joseph continually cleaves closely to facts then swerves, so anyone with a historical sense is double-taking on details.
Archduke certainly starts with an anchoring scene. We’re introduced at the outset to Gavrilo (Stanley Morgan), a name we know, and Nedeljkpo too (Chris Walley); as first one then the other enter a tunnel anxious and threadbare, skirting starvation and coughing up blood (apologetically) in lace handkerchiefs. Morgan’s perpetually anxious Gavrilo is initially countered by a thin veil of laddishness in Walley’s superbly ignorant Nedeljkpo, but they’re soon upstaged by a third figure.
Up to this point it’s perhaps more Rosencrantz and Guildenstern than Godot, but engaging. Full of tropes (particularly sandwiches) that gain significance, it almost threatens a unifying style, fractured with Nedeljkpo’s trigger-temper and Gavrilo’s unfortunate hitting the nail on his trigger-finger too often. Joseph though jump-cuts characters and styles.
Trifko (an imposing Abraham Popoola) explodes on the scene as a self-appointed intermediary with his trademark “Shut up”, looking for more conspirators. Here, there’s just the three. And like the tunnel’s warp, history bends too. Though by now who cares? The downside is that Walley and Popoola work hard to keep their characters in the story thereafter, with less lines. It’s a tribute to them they manage it, before re-establishing them with Morgan in the final scene.
Joseph is particularly good in isolating the fragility in male culture and how a wrong word detonates misunderstanding; how older, dominant personalities groom the vulnerable to do their bidding, and the farce of that tragedy. Enter Marc Wootton’s Dragutin “Apis” Dimitrijevic. If he wasn’t already so comedically renowned, he might almost be channelling Brian Blessed’s Price Vultan from Flash Gordon, or Blackadder’s Richard IV. Apis delivers a mean history lesson, but Wootton’s comedic brilliance dominates the rest of the act.
That’s with strong competition from Sladjana (Janice Connolly) who doesn’t have as many lines but slowly takes on the conscience of one who guesses the young men’s hunger even more than Apis; and more importantly his plans, and warns against. Invested with magic and other traditions laced with idiosyncrasies (a hatred of cats leads to one doubtful delicacy) her style, steadily delivered, mordant and ironic, at least offsets Wootton: the most fantastically decked (as a Ruritanian captain) in Evie Gurney’s costumes.
It also leads after the strange act one climax to a downturn in energy and focus after the interval. Two scenes in particular slow the action. Each is fine in itself. One’s in a chapel, led by Connolly, whose establishing of another way of thinking seems designed to foreground the three actors who get far less to do. So Walley and Popoola attend, but should beware cherries. The other featuring Morgan as the chosen assassin by Wootton, reinforces the absurd in the coercive. In all this there’s a whiff of Armando Iannucci’s 2017 film The Death of Stalin with its murderous high-jinks.
The production picks up the right energy for its finale largely because of Es Devlin’s set, aided by Skylar Fox’s illusion design and Neil Austin’s lighting, most spectral and striking in the tunnel. The set dominates, consisting of a tunnel warping round a sharp bend, like a reinforced wind-tunnel gone wonky. And the spectacular reveal at the end, the set morphing into a luxury 1914 carriage out of the Orient Express seems another character. It’s to the actors’ credit they’re not dwarfed by what should be an award-winning design. One studded at the halfway mark with a dining table and then that chapel. Tingying Dong’s sound brings incongruous music, then atmospheric effects.
That finale does touch a moment of transcendence, one of several in this occasionally brilliant, often laugh-out-loud two hours with interval. It perhaps might have worked better as a 100-minte straight through, shorn of its meaningful eddies that only seems to lead round a bend. Turner keeps it as tight as possible, but it’s Devlin that lends the production weight, and actors who populate it with a little truth.
Certainly a what-if is played out, in large part the point of Archduke. Joseph might know that two conspirators who survived went on to become professors and regretted the consequences of their actions. The desire to not be remembered but lead fulfilled lives wasn’t quite realised by those survivors – who became better-known for their later work. But it was preferable despite the evils of empire, to what followed. Joseph has crafted a teasing morality, one where freedom-fighting equates with bullying; and the nasty status quo with at least twenty million more people surviving the next few years; not to mention what happened next.
There’s enough kinks in the story, perhaps, not to render it quite so gordian a farce. A firecracker that, like one assassin’s bomb, doesn’t always go off in the places it should. Equally though it splutters and spits with life, and – if not one of the Court great vintage this year – is high entertainment for the theatre’s blazing midsummer.
Casting Director Julia Horan CDG, Props Supervisor Ryan O’Connor for ROC Props, Associate Designer Alice Hallifax, Temitayo Shonibare, Fight Director Sam Lyn-Behan, Casting Associate Royal Court Saffeya Shebli, Casting Assistant Poppy Apter, Assistant Director Mayaan Haputantri.
Production Manager Zara Drohan, Costume Supervisor Lucy Walshaw, Company Manager Mica Taylor, Stage Manager Lizzie Chapman, DSM Imogen Firth, ASM Ophir Westman, Stage Supervisor Steve Evans, Lighting Supervisor Lucinda Plummer, Lighting Programmer Lizzie Skellett.
Set Build Royal Court Stage Department, Wellbeing Support The Artist Wellbeing Company (Tricia Gannon), Lead Producer Hannah Lyall, Executive Producer Steven Atkinson.
