Review: Archduke, Rajiv Joseph’s Historical Comedy About Hungry Young Assassins

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an event widely credited with triggering the first World War, is not an obvious subject for comedy. But Rajiv Joseph tries his darndest to squeeze both laughs and wisdom from historical tragedy in Archduke, now making its off-Broadway debut with Roundabout Theatre Company at the Laura Pels Theatre. Unlike Gavrilo Princip, it sadly misses the mark.

We first meet 19-year-old Gavrilo (Jake Berne) hiding out in a Belgrade warehouse. He’s supposed to meet a man about a job, but he only encounters Nedeljko Čabrinović (Jason Sanchez), another emaciated young man who, like Gavrilo, is suffering from Tuberculosis. While their playful and occasionally confrontational banter is reminiscent of Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, they look a lot more like castaways from a bus-and-truck tour of Newsies.

Trifko Grabež (Adrien Rolet, marching stiffly like a tin soldier) arrives to take them to the home of Captain Dragutin Dimitrijević (Patrick Page), leader the Black Hand, a militant Serb nationalist group with a burning hatred of the Habsburgs. While treating the half-starved boys to the most extravagant meal of their lives, he reminds them why they too should hate the Imperial family of Austria-Hungary and proffers a plan for them to take a sleeper train to Sarajevo and murder the heir to the throne.

If we’re going to hear exposition about rising ethno-nationalist tensions in the Habsburg patrimony, it might as well be in Page’s pleasantly honeyed growl. Standing before a giant map of the Empire, he pontificates on the perversity of Serbs bending the knee to this ridiculous clan of mustachioed inbreds. Naturally, the boys are mesmerized by the passionate ravings of an eccentric black sheep of the ruling class. But maybe they’re just happy to have someone feed them a hot meal and acknowledge them as men capable of doing more than dying of consumption in their early 20s.

“Boys are ready for sweets,” says the captain’s maid, Sladjana (Kristine Nielsen) as she retrieves the dessert cart. Much of the humor in Archduke derives from the outsize performances of its two veteran actors. Simultaneously witchy and ridiculous, Nielsen wrings humor from every line with her contorted facial expressions and seriously committed (as in eligible for the asylum) line readings. The straight man to her clown, Page is often even funnier in his struggle to marshal dignity in a situation that verges on farce—verges, but never quite arrives.

Joseph is shrewd to draw a parallel between Austria-Hungary and our own multiethnic empire, its warring tribes increasingly held together by very little beyond a legacy state and a prayer. 1914-1918 was a time of rapid technological progress, when Emperors and Kings commanded armies of landships and fleets of biplanes, which also feels familiar as the dawn of artificial intelligence coincides with Boomerdämmerung.

However, if you’re going to write a comedy set in the past that points mockingly to the present, it ought to be really funny. Armando Iannucci’s 2017 film The Death of Stalin, which imagines that the Soviet politburo was just as dysfunctional as your office, is a good example. Archduke never quite reaches those gasping, wheezing heights of hilarity, settling into a gentle absurdity that can only ever garner mild chuckles.

Unable to craft the comic beats that might really make this play work, director Darko Tresnjak at least stages a handsome production, with a few sight gags served up like so much pudding on Alexander Dodge’s rotating set (there are pigs’ heads with apples stuffed in their mouths during the feast scene). Linda Cho’s costumes capture the patched grime of the early 20^th century underclass. Sound designer Jane Shaw cleverly underscores the transitions (love that Balkan brass arrangement of the Bond theme) and undergirds key moments with soap operatic notes of tension.

Offering divine intervention through lighting design, Matthew Richards bathes the stage with an incandescent glow. Suddenly, the Orthodox icons on the wall seem to radiate a beautiful and terrible force. It’s the visual manifestation of tribal frenzy, a phenomenon we secular materialists still struggle to explain and confront.

Joseph’s humanity feels genuine in a cop-out ending envisioning an alternate history. If only someone without a sinister political agenda offered these boys a sandwich, he says, but he’s really asking his well-heeled audience, What is stopping you from offering the lost young men of our country the sustenance they need? It’s touching, if a bit naive.

No one builds up a massive military force if they don’t intend to someday use it. If the assassination of Franz Ferdinand had failed, something else would have been held up as an excuse to commence the slaughter crowned heads (and, more distressingly, the public) craved as the concert of Europe grew more dissonant. But maybe that’s just my 2025 cynicism talking.

Archduke made its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum way back in 2017, those heady days of the #resistance to the first Trump administration, when it still seemed possible to turn back. Having traveled eight years further down the road to ruin, it looks a lot less like a wrong turn than fate, another force we modern folk are disinclined to contemplate. Warn the Duke or don’t, the seasons still change and we mortals are powerless to stop them.