Yesterday, the world learned of the death of Tom Stoppard, who was probably the world's greatest living playwright. As it so happens, I had a ticket that night to see Archduke by Rajiv Joseph, who like all dramatists today could not help but be influenced by Stoppard.
I think it's fair to say that Archduke couldn't have been written without Stoppard's plays, which brought high comedy to intellectual niche issues. Stoppard burst onto the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966 with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which brought the sensibility of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot together with William Shakespeare's best-known tragedy, telling the whole story through the eyes of seemingly insignificant characters.
Stoppard followed up that success with The Real Inspector Hound, which skewered the mysteries of Agatha Christie with the same intellectual vigor he had used with Shakespeare. It also happens to be one of the funniest one-act plays you'll ever encounter. His 1972 play Jumpers satirized passing fads in British politics, but also probed the deepest recesses of human emotion. One of my favorites of his plays, Travesties, imagines unlikely meetings involving author James Joyce, revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, and Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara.
Critics who had accused Stoppard of lacking emotion had to eat their words when he premiered Arcadia in 1993. He followed that up with other successes, including the three-part epic The Coast of Utopia, the deeply personal Rock 'n' Roll, and most recently the sprawling Leopoldstadt. All of those plays re-imagine historical events in intensely theatrical ways, something Joseph tries to do in Archduke.
While I didn't find Archduke up to the standards of some of Joseph's other plays like Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, it clearly has ambition, and I have to applaud it for that. The play portrays Gavrillo Princip, the assassin whose bullets ultimately started the First World War. Rather than directly portray the farcical manner in which that assassination unfolded, Joseph shows what happened before the fateful day.
Newcomer Jake Berne plays Princip, but the real star of the play is Patrick Page, who plays Dragutin Dimitrijevic, leader of the Black Hand Society. Page's fast past, sharp wit, and impeccable timing would make him perfect for a role in a Stoppard play. How sad we'll never get another one again.
