Unsettling Absurdist Comedy

“You think we can get to Sarajevo at half past nine, then ask about, find a brothel, be with a woman and get to the Archduke by half past ten?”

Gavrilo

The Royal Court has long had a reputation for new plays and experimentation and as such is most highly valued. Not every play will be a great success but the Court gets credit for trying. Assembling the team of director Lyndsey Turner and set designer Es Devlin raises our expectations. For it then to be a play about the origins of the First World War and not about life or death in the trenches is even more promising. If there is a weak point here, it is American playwright Rajiv Joseph’s supposition about the ridiculous way the people behind the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Joseph, arrived at this momentous historical event.

The two bits of trivia I remember from history are that Franz Joseph married an unsuitable woman; she had been a lady in waiting but although her father was a count, she was not related to the dynastic line of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So his marriage was morganatic, his children with her, could not succeed to the throne. Also Sophie was not accorded royal receptions with her husband and Sarajevo was an exception. Bosnia Herzogovinia had asked the Archduke there as a military commander not as a member of royalty and because of this distinction, Sophie was allowed to accompany him.

When the archduke and his wife were shot by Gavrilo Princip (Stanley Morgan) as they tried to get to staunch the wound in the Archduke’s torso, they failed to open his jacket because in order to look his best, he had been sewn into it. So they were unable to stop the bleeding. It is these stories which thrill me most about the study of history. Sophie his wife was also shot dead.

The play starts in Es Devlin’s magnificent circular sewer set where Gavrilo and Nedeljko (Chris Walley) have been told to meet. They have seen a doctor who has diagnosed both with a terminal condition tuberculosis or consumption, maybe a month to live and offered them the opportunity to give their life some meaning. They are joined by Trifko (Abraham Popoola) who has been sent to meet five of them but only two are there. Trifko was also diagnosed with TB a year ago and then given a month to live.

Trifko takes them to meet organiser Dragutin “Apis” Dimitrijevic (Mark Wooton) an experienced assassin who relates at length his disembowelling of two members of the Serbian royal family. Apis brings his recruits up to date politically with summaries of the Balkan Wars.

The final scene has a splendid railway coach as the men travel to Sarajevo. It is the assassination of the Archduke by the Bosnian Serb Gavrilo which causes the French Russian Serbian faction to line up against Austria, Hungary and Germany and start the worldwide war. There is a side scene with the old woman cook Sladjana (Janice Connolly) with terrible hatred of cats and kittens which I didn’t find funny.

What I found strange was the amount of laughter from the audience at the clumsiness of the assassins and the absurdist way it is written but it is billed as a black comedy. However it is a salutary lesson as to how a world can stumble into a worldwide war.