(10/4) R. U. R. by Karel Capek

 



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Script

Reviews

"R.U.R. is a 1920 science fiction play by the Czech writer Karel Čapek. R.U.R. stands for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum's Universal Robots).[1] The English phrase "Rossum's Universal Robots" has been used as a subtitle.[2] It premiered on 25 January 1921 and introduced the word "robot" to the English language and to science fiction as a whole.[3]

R.U.R. quickly became influential after its publication.[4][5][6] By 1923, it had been translated into thirty languages.[4][7]

The play begins in a factory that makes artificial people, called roboti (robots), from synthetic organic matter. They are living creatures of artificial flesh and blood rather than machinery. They may be mistaken for humans and can think for themselves. They seem happy to work for humans at first, but a robot rebellion leads to the extinction of the human race. Čapek later took a different approach to the same theme in War with the Newts, in which non-humans become a servant class in human society.[8]

R.U.R. was successful in its time in Europe and North America." (Wikipedia)

Videos

Players Theatre (NYC) -- I have only watched a few minutes of this performance, and from what I've seen... I don't recommend it, unless you want to see why actors are not necessarily better just because they live in the 100-zip code.


Background Information
Why I Chose This Play (Gregory Roberts-Gassler)

R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) was written by Karel Čapek and first performed at the National Theater in Prague in 1921. It quickly became popular not just locally but abroad: Spencer Tracy had his Broadway début as a robot and when the BBC aired a 45-minute adaptation for broadcast, it became the first science fiction content for television. It was so popular the the word "robot" (invented, apparently, by the playwright's brother Joseph as a derivative of a Czech word for serf or slave) soon displaced the earlier terms "automaton" and "android" even though the products depicted in the play actually bear more resemblance to golems or homunculi. The name "Rossum" seems to be derived from a Czech word for "Reason" as in wisdom or intellect, which is why I'd like to interpret the title as something more like "Slaves to Universal Reason", which captures one of the underlying themes of the play. The translation available on Scribd, which is the earliest translation into English, abridges the text somewhat and eliminates one of the characters, a robot named Damon. If possible, I would urge you to instead read the more recent translation, which handles the entire text. R.U.R. is probably Čapek's most popular work, but his most important, arguably, from the perspective of science fiction and political speculation, is his later novel War with the Newts, which has a suspiciously similar plot to this early play, but far more developed, starting with prospectors training Pacific amphibians to dive for pearls and once they've proved trainable, enslaving them to work, all the while teaching them the secrets of capitalism unaware we are writing our own doom.

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