Archduke play at the Royal Court: A fascinating comedy about radicalisation

Archduke | Royal Court | ★★★★☆

I’m not sure what I expected from this play about the days preceding the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand – the event credited with starting the First World War – but it wasn’t a comedy of errors whose influences run the gamut from Withnail and I to Chris Morris’s Four Lions.

It takes place in the tunnels beneath Serbia, where two destitute, consumptive young men are being recruited into the nationalist militia. While they dream of warm sandwiches and the touch of a woman, forces beyond their ken have grander plans for them… plans that will take them all the way to the streets of Sarajevo.

Archduke is unusual in its tone, remaining mercilessly upbeat despite the fact it’s a play about the grooming of vulnerable people to commit acts of war – something that has clear and depressing parallels in the world today.

Archduke wears its influences on its sleeve

There are echoes of Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter to the set-up: naive men involved in some murky business, straining to understand what, exactly, is going on. But Archduke is a largely breezy affair, given the subject matter, filled with physical comedy and visual gags. There are ineffectual scraps, overblown speeches, even the odd bit of magical sleight of hand.

While the young men are all excellently played, Marc Wootton steals the show as a leader of the Serbian nationalist cell. He plays The Captain with the gusto of Brian Blessed and the sexual menace of Richard Griffiths’s Uncle Monty from Withnail, referring to the hapless recruits as “My boys” and professing his love for them even as he suggests they might want to drink cyanide after finishing the job.

Es Devlin’s set is also magnificent, an underground tunnel that makes exceptional use of forced perspective, which transforms into the opulence of a sleeper train and the lofty darkness of a chapel. Magnificent stuff.

Like Chris Morris’s Four Lions, which followed a group of wannabe Islamic martyrs, writer Rajiv Joseph shows that laughing at something doesn’t have to trivialise it, rather it can be a way of confronting things too dark to otherwise face.

• To book tickets to Archduke visit the website here