A play that famously coined a word for the ages is also a pioneering science fiction work with a vision of a future we are catching up to over a hundred years later.
Just imagine a world where people create artificial devices to do their work, only to find themselves displaced by the same machines faster than you can say “Sarah Connor.”
There was no such word as “robots,” or, to use its original Czech form, roboti, before a young writer named Karel Čapek used it to categorize the menacing non-humans who loom over his play. Karel gave credit to his brother Josef for the word.
A long prologue explains how back in 1932 (a dozen years after this was written) a somewhat unstable man named Rossum invented an autonomous, fabricated humanoid he dubbed “Robots.” Easy to build, each does the work of many people. But the more the Robots are tasked to do, the more they pick up the traits and quirks of their human makers.
On a distant island where Robots are made, a visitor named Helena listens as the men who run things lay out their vision of the future:
DOMIN: …within the next ten years Rossum’s Universal Robots will produce so much wheat, so much cloth, so much everything that things will no longer have any value. Everyone will be able to take as much as he needs. There’ll be no more poverty. Yes, people will be out of work, but by then there’ll be no work left to be done. [Prologue]
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| R. U. R. made its American debut in New York City in 1922. Two future famous actors played Robots, Pat O'Brien and Spencer Tracy. Here, Helena is introduced to a pair of specimens, assured they have no feelings: "Grass has more will to live than they do." Photo by Francis Bruguiere from https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/R._U._R._%28Rossum%27s_Universal_Robots%29/Act_1 |
R. U. R. is famous more for its vision than the bleak but rather bland yarn it spins. The fear of technological progress spiraling out of control was something people already knew well in the 1920s, with anxieties of technocracy and universal assembly lines. Generations before white-collar workers wondered what artificial intelligence could do to their paychecks, broad swaths of people were well aware of the perils of machine living.
Čapek’s stage play blends futurity, absurdity, and horror, though precious little action. Instead, R. U. R. functions as both philosophical symposium and slow-rolling nightmare, especially when the Robots begin taking over and demand the secret of their creation.
Even as more serious themes take over, undercurrents of whimsy swirl throughout the play, like a scientist figuring he can blunt the Robot threat by making them all look different:
DOMIN: It means that each factory will be making Robots of a different color, a different nationality, a different tongue, they’ll all be different–as different from one another as fingerprints; they’ll no longer be able to conspire with one another; and we–we people will help to foster their prejudices and cultivate their mutual lack of understanding, you see? So that any given Robot, to the day of its death, right to the grave, will forever hate a Robot bearing the trademark of another factory.
HALLEMEIER: Thunder, we’ll make Black Robots and Swedish Robots and Italian Robots and Chinese Robots, and then let someone try to drive the notion of brotherhood into the noggin of their organization. [Act One]
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| A scene from a 1938 British television adaptation of R. U. R., in which Robots start putting a former human master to work trying to replicate them. It marks the start of a long and profitable relationship, not for the Robots but for science fiction and the B. B. C. Image from https://televisionheaven.co.uk/reviews/r-u-r |
Despite some intriguing flourishes, there isn’t much story to R. U. R. Its characters are broad architypes, including a businessman, a scientist, and a dreamer. It starts out, quite surprisingly, in the realm of screwball comedy in which a woman is buffeted with marriage proposals after trying to guess which one of her suitors is really human. It finishes a sobering ideation of a world lost to humanity but perhaps not to some larger life principle worth keeping.
Čapek keeps shifting tone from act to act, from humor to fear to despair to hope. This may be as intriguing as the play’s concept; yet it makes the work hard to follow.
The Robots themselves (the word is always capitalized in the play) are not metal but grown from synthesized human flesh. There is even a spinning mill for nerves. They know nothing of pain or flavor, we are told when they inevitably wear out they are sent to the stamping mill for recycling.
As soon as they are created, they are put to work. As a manufacturer named Fabry explains it, there is no nursery for Robots: “From a technical standpoint the whole of childhood is pure nonsense. Simply wasted time.”
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| A poster from an early staging of R. U. R. in Prague. It opened there on January 2, 1921, the second day of a new decade in what was then the capital of a new country, Czechoslovakia. The shadow of World War I looms large in its proceedings. Image from https://mzv.gov.cz/tirana/en/about_the_czech_republic/x100_year_ago_robot_was_born.html |
They are played by people on stage with regular clothes, “linen shirts tightened at their waists with belts and…brass numbers on their chests.” They are expressionless voids whose sudden rebel impulse seemed to evolve over time:
HELENA: Is this…this hatred of theirs another human characteristic, perhaps?
DR. GALL: [shrugging his shoulders]: Even that’s progress, I suppose. [Act One]
Whether read or staged, following R. U. R. can be a challenge. Its characters sleepwalk through a constant succession of crises that are never fully addressed or resolved. Perhaps Čapek is calling out a blindness in the way humans navigate their way through life, focused too much on money and not the soul. But it lends a contrived aspect to the drama. If no one takes this seriously, why should we?
A real moral calamity begins even before the Robots rise up, a dilemma articulated by a conservative man of faith, Alquist.
ALQUIST: The whole world, all the lands, all mankind, everything’s become one big beastly orgy! People don’t even stretch out their hands for food anymore; it’s stuffed right in their mouths to them so they don’t even have to get up… [Act One]
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| While fairly rare, modern stagings of R. U. R. do occur. Above, a scene from a 2017 performance at the Gamut Theatre in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Much of the play is set in an office overlooking a factory. The time of the play was apparently intended to be around the year 2000, though nothing is spelled out. Image from https://www.gamuttheatre.org/rossums-universal-robots |
So bad is this situation that it is blamed for a failure of people to reproduce. Natality has gone down to zero, we are told, because men no longer feel the impulse to do much of anything. “You expect women to have children by such men,” Alquist asks. “To men who are superfluous women will not bear children!”
The drawn-out discussion continues into Act Two, by which time the robots have overrun most of the island. In a lone building the humans still control, talk still goes on, only as the lights flicker out the topic shifts to “What backfired.”
One fellow has the bold idea of bribing the Robots with the billions of dollars collected from selling them. At least he tries.
Čapek’s concept for R. U. R., he later explained, was to present a multiplicity of views about human progress, giving each take its own spotlight turn. No one is shown as all wrong or all right. The factory boss Domin who sees Robots as helping humanity has a point. So does Alquist with his concern of overstepping the bounds of nature. Helena, the main female character, wonders if the Robots have souls, and if not, can they be installed. She represents compassion, maybe too much.
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| In a middle act of R. U. R., a Robot modelled on the main female figure is created. Something similar happens in the famous 1927 movie Metropolis. In R. U. R., the woman is named Helena; in Metropolis, her name is Hel. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(1927_film) |
All is served up with a healthy dose of cynicism. “People with ideas should not be allowed to have an influence on affairs of this world,” a scientist declares, by which time the endless blather have squandered their window for escape. Only arrogance remains.
ALQUIST: The real crime was producing Robots in the first place!
DOMIN: No, Alquist. I don’t regret that. Even today.
ALQUIST: Not even today?
DOMIN: Not even today on the last day of civilization. It was a great thing. [Act Two]
R. U. R. is a dry play. The characters have their say but make no individual impression. But it has the audacity of its ideas, which include that replacing God with science is a recipe for disaster. This is comically introduced in Act One by Nana, Helena’s servant and the other female character. “Heaven’ll send down a terrible punishment – remember that – a terrible punishment!” she says, sounding like a villager in Frankenstein.
Still, Čapek makes clear hers is a valid viewpoint. In an introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, Czech scholar Ivan Klíma points out the play had not only a humanist message but a religious one, too. Čapek said his artificial-man concept was “inspired by a foolish and obstinate wish to prove God unnecessary and meaningless.” This is called out most directly in the final act.
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Author Karel Čapek. He wrote many plays in his short life, including one other famous science fiction work, The War With The Newts, as well as novels, essays, and humor. Neither a man of the left or right, he remains a hero of the Czech Republic. Image from https://english.radio.cz/130th-anniversary-birth-great-interwar-writer-karel-capek-8111081 |
Čapek was a remarkable figure in many ways, a brave activist for democracy when his young nation was threatened by the chaotic forces of Nazism and Communism and a protean writer of many types of literature over a short 20-year writing career. He died of illness in 1938, just around the time Czechoslovakia fell to Hitler.
This may have been a merciful ending, as his writings had marked him as an enemy of the Fuhrer. [His brother Josef would die late in the war as an inmate at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.]
R. U. R. has a lot to say, and the time for listening is still with us. However, as a play I get why it is not often staged. It doesn’t have momentum or a through-line, just some meaty ideas to expound upon. It still speaks to us, if mostly as an influence on every robot story that followed.
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