April 11, 2025
Kellie Mecleary, Production Dramaturg
“Some of the most interesting recent writing on the subject [of WWI] has argued that, far from being inevitable, this war was in fact ‘improbable’ – at least until it actually happened…I have tried to remain alert to the fact that the people, events, and forces [which led to the war]…carried in them the seeds of other, perhaps less terrible, futures.”
Christopher Clark in the introduction to The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
Archduke is a riff on history. The Sleepwalkers, a thorough examination of the ‘people, events and forces’ which culminated in World War I, was Rajiv Joseph’s main source in writing the play, and his knowledge of this moment in history is more than evident. The description of the 1903 assassinations of King Alexander and Queen Draga are spot on – until they aren’t. The boys’ imaginings of how Nedeljko would fail to assassinate the Archduke near the end of the play align exactly with the real-life Nedeljko’s actual failures. Apis’ heady lecture on the Austro-Hungarian empire’s weakening hold on Europe is factually correct. But Apis didn’t murder Alexander and Draga – he was shot in the lobby of their palace and unconscious for the assassination itself. The boys weren’t indoctrinated in days, but over years. And they likely never even met Apis, who was far higher in the Black Hand hierarchy than they were.
Arguably, history itself gives Joseph permission to play with it: there’s so much we don’t know. The Black Hand was an extremely secretive, uber-Nationalist organization with a habit of burning documents daily. Most of what historians know of the assassination comes from court transcripts from the assassins’ trials, and even these are circumspect. The conspirators obfuscated the truth to try to save or aggrandize themselves, or in loyalty to the Black Hand.
Arguably, history itself gives Joseph permission to play with it: there’s so much we don’t know. The Black Hand was an extremely secretive, uber-Nationalist organization with a habit of burning documents daily. Most of what historians know of the assassination comes from court transcripts from the assassins’ trials, and even these are circumspect. The conspirators obfuscated the truth to try to save or aggrandize themselves, or in loyalty to the Black Hand.
And anyways, history is just sort of slippery. A great example of this is the story of Gavrilo Princip’s sandwich. I first heard this in a lecture given by renowned Yale historian Timothy Snyder in 2022, and it’s regularly taught in history lessons all over. The story goes that, on the day of the assassination, after Nedeljko Čabrinović threw a bomb at the Archduke’s cavalcade (which missed the Archduke’s car, leaving him unscathed), Gavrilo gave up hope of completing his mission and went to get a sandwich. As he was eating said sandwich, the Archduke’s car pulled up directly in front of the deli where he sat, causing him to abandon his meal and assassinate the Archduke and his wife at point blank range. This is a total fiction, the origins of which can be traced back to a Portuguese novel wherein a time-travelling, twelve-fingered man meets Gavrilo eating a sandwich on the Appel Quay. One can’t help but wonder if our boys’ obsession with sandwiches is Rajiv Joseph’s winking way of acknowledging our weird relationship with the past.
But more than this, the playwright’s choice to compress events into a few days’ time gives us a sense of how these boys were indoctrinated into the Serbian nationalist ideology: older men taking advantage of their desperate states, their longing for male role models, and their under-developed brains. And, in the boys’ confusion and uncertainty over the task given to them by Apis, we see very clearly the “seeds of other, less terrible, futures.” Nothing seems inevitable. Other choices are possible. How might we apply this sense of possibility to the overwhelming challenges of our time?
Below you’ll find links to some sources that will offer you context for this moment in history and some of the circumstances that fuel it. If you only have a little time, there are some shorter articles and videos which give a good overview (as well as a glossary of selected terms in our program), but there are also podcast episodes and full-length books for those who want a deeper dive. I’ve also included links to some information on tuberculosis and Serbian villages (from which Sladjana may have come). My hope is that this material will deepen your relationship to the play and our past, putting it in conversation with our strange, unsettling present. And, perhaps, dreams of less terrible futures.
