RUR has had a big influence on popular culture through movies such as Blade Runner and Westworld and TV series like The Outer Limits.

Karel Čapek – who worked closely with his brother, Josef – was a witty journalist, poet and playwright who had a prophetic vision. Look up artificial intelligence online today and you will find it being promoted with the revealing phrase “future-proof your competitive advantage”. The point is reinforced when the idealistic engineer claims: “Dividends will be the ruin of humanity.” Čapek’s target is not technology as such but its commercial exploitation. “Do you know what has caused this calamity? Sheer volume!” cries the marketing manager in the most recent translation by Peter Majer and Cathy Porter.

What the play is actually attacking is capitalist greed in that overproduction precipitates the crisis. Photograph: Fiona Morgan Photography for National Youth Theatre, Ireland 2017īut I don’t see Čapek’s play as anti-science: initially it suggests robots can relieve humanity of demeaning drudgery. 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.

Karel capek rossum's universal robots