Archduke at the Royal Court – review

“Unification and a sandwich and being with a woman. All three interest me in different ways.” These are the words of the young Nedeljko, the man who threw a bomb at a car he thought was carrying Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. He hit the wrong target, but his friend Gavrilo didn’t, and everyone knows what happened next.

Archduke, first seen in New York in 2025, is the latest instalment in playwright Rajiv Joseph’s examination of young and confused men on the fringes of earthshattering events, following on from Guards at the Taj and Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo.

This surreal black comedy in six sharply-written scenes takes Nedeljko and Gavrilo through their meeting in a tunnel where both have been sent by the doctor who diagnosed them as “lungers” – men dying of TB – to a rail carriage on the way to Sarajevo where, with their comrade Trifko, they debate the merits of political assassination in the interests of Slavic independence versus a quick trip to a brothel to lose their virginity.

Joseph portrays them as lost boys, funny, sad and confused, who are being used by the insane megalomaniac Dragutin “Apis” Dimitrijevic as fodder for his crazed plans. As played by Marc Wootton, “Apis” is a splenetic bully of a man, imprisoned in his over-tight military uniform like a trussed-up marionette, and spending far too long drooling over his disembowelment of the Serbian queen, a gruesome act that might just result from sexual jealousy.

At one point in Lyndsey Turner’s production, he walks away with literal smoke coming out of his collar, such is the pure evil of his obsession. He is served – and sometimes obstructed – by Janice Connolly’s Sladjana, an old woman who seeks to show the men that there is another way for them to behave – a point slightly undermined by her own violent tendencies towards cats.

It’s all very bizarre, and often very funny. Joseph’s dialogue for the men is an intriguing and often hilarious mixture of the factual and the imagined, historical truths mixed in with preposterous stories. Their position is full of pathos: they are very young and very poor, longing for the good things in life before their inevitable death.

Their delight when Es Devlin’s clever tunnel set transforms into a gleaming rail carriage to take them to their destination is all the more touching because you know the fate that awaits them and the world if they carry out their mission. The possibility that they might simply get off the train and run is tantalising, another set of maybes in the confused history of the shooting that began the First World War.

It’s all beautifully done, and Turner’s direction finds just the right balance between high comedy and reflection; Stanley Morgan, Abraham Popoola and Chris Walley cleverly mine the differences and similarities between the men.

But amidst the mayhem, it’s sometimes difficult to discern what the overall point is. Perhaps that is the point. People do bad things for multiple reasons: for money, for politics, because they hate women, because they long for fame. Their actions have repercussions that they may not have dreamt of. And history doesn’t always remember their names.