RUR is a 1921 play by the Czech writer, Karel Capek. It's science fiction and Capek is credited with coining the term "robot". (In Czech, robota means a "serf" or "one who provides forced labor.") The version of the play reviewed in this note was performed at the Riverland Community College on October 8, 2017, a production of the Theater Department adapted by the show's director, Susan Hansen.
The play is witty and thought-provoking. The robot attack in the third act is good campy fun and, yet, the play also makes some serious points and has an interesting, unexpected ending. Like much science fiction, the rational scientists and industrialists in the play don't seem to fully comprehend the dire, catastrophic aspects of the plot that they set in motion -- people are blithely indifferent to the end of the world. But this is part of the fun of this kind of speculative theater -- if we were take the play's premises too seriously, I suppose, we would all run screaming from the theater. The show produces the same effect as zombie movies, a genre closely aligned with robot fiction -- the horror is cushioned by the blandly philosophizing responses to the catastrophe as well as the anesthetizing nonchalance of the protagonists.
RUR begins with a do-gooder girl appearing the RUR factory. For complex reasons of plotting, the Rossums, father and son scientists, are deceased. The robot factory is run by a perky industrialist who crows about reducing the unit price of the robots that the business sells and improving their functionality. The do-gooder activist believes that the robots are a species of slave and that they are being abused by their human masters. The industrialist argues that the robots are just human-looking machines and that you can't be cruel to a machine. The do-gooder robot's rights advocate inexplicably falls in love with the fast-talking, facile, but handsome industrialist. The second act takes place after the lapse of a year. The activist girl is now living with the industrialist in a "smart house" -- it's like having Alexa around to do things for you. The "U" in RUR stands for "universal" and the business has made a mistake in designing robots that are capable of communicating with one another. The robots have gone on a coordinated strike. Robot soldiers designed to invade and destroy the people of occupied territories have run amuck and killed 700,000 people. The do-gooder girl learns of these calamities through Skype with a robots' rights advocate. She decides the delete the secret enzyme and protein formulae necessary to creating new robots. In the third act, we learn that one of the scientists has taken the do-gooder girl's admonition to make the robots more lifelike -- she has engineered them to feel pain, to be irritable, and to have something like human emotions. But men is wolf to man: Homo homini lupus -- and making the robots more like people has triggered in them a will to power. They have now taken over the world. They storm the compound where the industrialist, his do-gooder mate, and the rest of the surviving humans are fortified. Everyone is killed except an old factory manager, a fellow who is religious and likes to work with his hands. In the last act, the old factory manager is forced to experiment on the robots to figure out a way to reproduce them -- the secret formula has been lost, however, and it appears that the robots, who now control the whole world, are doomed to simply wear-out and fail. The robots insist that the old factory manager vivisect one of them to try to discover the secret of life -- but this fails. Enter two new characters -- a boy and girl robot. These are the last generation of robots built before the humans were destroyed. The boy and girl robot are in robot-love and, when the old factory manager tests their loyalty, each would rather die than allow the other to suffer. These robots can laugh and cry -- the pious factory owner declares them Adam and Eve and rejoices that a new generation of super-human, emotionally competent robots will now inherit the earth. It's not clear exactly how the reproductive problem is solved -- but the show's end suggests that Love will find a way.
In Capek's vision, the robots clearly represent the "industrial army" that Marx surmised would form the shock-troops of international Communism. There is copious parody of Marxist doctrine: the Robots of the World are commanded to unite and rise in rebellion. Once the robots have taken over, the audience is faced with a nasty satire on the dictatorship of the proletariat. The robots blindly make more and more goods, but there is no one to consume them. Several strands combine to keep the show interesting: first there is the standard robot-film theme -- what defines humans? How are we different from robots? This has been a central philosophical concern in the West beginning with Descartes' assertion that animals were simply machines made of meat and that humans were meat-machines themselves but with souls. The second strand in the show relates to human hubris -- the danger of Utopian thinking. The robots have abolished all human labor but this causes people to feel their lives are futile -- indeed, futile to the extent that human men and women cease reproducing. Finally, there is the Marxist strand to the show's ideology, the satirical equation of the industrial army of the proletariat with a mass of soulless robots. The show is brisk with lots of talk. The set was a simple utilitarian sitting room with patterns cast on the walls simulating integrated circuits. The script was clearly updated in a cleverly effective way -- the characters talks about the internet, Skype with one another, and use drones. When the last human being falls to the floor at the show's end, there is a suggestion that nano-bot therapy will revive him. The acting was good and the final act, a curious combination of kitsch and emotionally moving material, was excellent.
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