"Archduke" Can't Decide What It Wants to Kill
In Rajiv Joseph's "Archduke," now playing at Roundabout Theatre Company, a group of young Serbian revolutionaries plot the murder that sparked World War I while obsessing over women they've never touched and coughing up blood into handkerchiefs. They're all virgins, all consumed by tuberculosis, all desperate to mean something before they die—which makes the whole assassination plot feel less like political conviction and more like a particularly dramatic bucket list.
Jake Berne's Gavrilo Princip paces and frets, yearning, as young protagonists often do, for meaning. Adrien Rolet brings a fervent intensity to his conspirator, while Jason Sanchez lightens the whole operation with a naive romanticism.
The production wants to say something about radicalization—how ordinary young men become willing to kill—but it can't quite decide what that something is. Joseph's script doesn’t fully committing to any single register. It's tonally discordant in a way that's sometimes intriguing, sometimes just frustrating. You stay engaged, curious where it's going, but it never quite gets there.
Joseph plays fast and loose with the historical record, which would be fine if the liberties served a clear dramatic purpose. But the invented details and compressed timeline feel arbitrary rather than illuminating—less like artistic license and more like homework skipped. The play wants the gravitas that comes with depicting real events while also wanting the freedom to reshape those events at will. It ends up in an awkward middle ground: not rigorous enough to function as historical drama, not imaginative enough in its departures to justify abandoning accuracy altogether. You're left wondering what we gain from the fabrications, and the answer isn't entirely clear.
What does land, consistently and gloriously, is Patrick Page. Page does what Patrick Page does—commands the stage with that resonant voice, radiating menace and charisma in equal measure—and you're grateful for every moment he's present. His scenes have weight, purpose, the gravitas the rest of the production reaches for but doesn't quite grasp.
"Archduke" is engaging enough in the moment, but it doesn't burrow under your skin. It gestures toward profundity without achieving it, leaving you with a handful of strong performances and a vague sense that there was something more substantial here, just out of reach.
Playing October 23—December 21, 2025
