Only a single engineer survives who, a touch improbably, shows two robots transformed by love.Ī 2017 production of RUR by Youth Theatre Ireland for the National Youth Theatre, produced by Alan King. With time, the play gets darker as the robots prove to be stronger and more intelligent than their creators and eventually wipe out virtually all humankind. She is amazed to discover that a plausibly human secretary is a machine and is equally astonished when the factory’s directors turn out to be flesh and blood creatures rather than robots. It starts almost as a Shavian comedy with a do-gooding visitor, Lady Helen Glory, turning up on an island where robots are manufactured out of synthetic matter. Given our fascination with artificial intelligence, it’s high time we gave it another look.īut what kind of play is it exactly? A dystopian drama attacking science and technology? Up to a point, but it’s much more than that. But a play that was hugely popular in its time – its Broadway premiere in 1922 had a cast that included Spencer Tracy and Pat O’Brien as robots – has now fallen into neglect. Every time we use the word “ robot” to denote a humanoid machine, it derives from Čapek’s play, which coined the term from the Czech “robota” meaning forced labour. One that did was Karel Čapek’s RUR: Rossum’s Universal Robots that had its premiere in Prague 100 years ago this month. N ot many plays introduce a new word to the language.
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