Most of us have written an essay on the origins of the first world war, exam-cramming the names of Bosnian Serb teenager Gavrilo Princip and his victims – Austrian-Hungarian heir Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie – in Sarajevo almost exactly 112 years ago. A textbook answer is that their assassinations militarised Europe.
However, a student who answered a question on the origins of the 1914-18 conflict with the farcical speculation in Rajiv Joseph’s 2025 play Archduke might face a retake. Unemployed and diagnosed as a “lunger” (consumptive), Princip (Stanley Morgan) receives a “job” offer from Apis (Marc Wootton), a Slav nationalist who recruits Gavrilo and two other starving sick youths, Trifco (Abraham Popoola) and Nedeljko (Chris Walley), by filling their minds with a rant on historical wrongs and their bellies with the menus of his devout housekeeper, Sladjana (Janice Connolly). The lungers’ hunger is a major motivation, a recurring metaphor involving fancy sandwiches.
