The first full-scale production on the stage at the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities is Headlong’s radical reimagining of Karel Čapek’s ‘robot play’, R.U.R., which was first performed in 1920 and brought Czech literature to the world. Robota or Prove You’re Not was written by Ella Road, author of The Phlebotomist and episodes of Black Mirror and Doctor Who, among other writing credits, using my literal translation. R.U.R. gave the world not only the word ‘robot’, but also, drawing on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the legend of the Golem (since the 1830s popularly located in Prague), a highly repeatable recipe for examining the relationship between human beings and advanced technologies they invent but quickly lose control of. Its ingredients are visible throughout twentieth-century science-fiction, from classics like 2001 and Blade Runner to contemporary TV series like Channel 4’s Humans (where the inventor of the synthetic human beings is called Capek) and Apple’s Severance (where the main disruptor-character – and daughter of an influential man – is called Helly/Helena, as in R.U.R.).
Early in the development of the project, Headlong’s creative team invited Schwarzman-based researchers to meet them to talk about the play and their plans for its adaptation. We talked about Čapek, Czechoslovakia, and the cultural and political context of the original, how the play has been interpreted and especially what it is like to teach the play and the responses of students. One past student’s reading of Čapek’s character of Helena as an Extinction Rebellion-type global activist, revolting against her own elite, privileged background, seemed to have crept into the portrayal of Helen in Robota. At the meeting, second-year French DPhil Benjamin Micallef gave us a stunning impromptu crash-course in cybernetics that apparently had a profound effect on the team’s thinking, including the stage design and perhaps even the character of sensitive boffin Ali.
It will be fun in future years to invite First Year Czech students to compare Čapek’s play with Road’s. I feel sure that as an ardent Anglophile, who won British hearts in the 1920s with his accounts of his travels in the British Isles, published in The Manchester Guardian, and his book about suburban gardening, Čapek would blush to learn that British creative artists and audiences were still so actively interested in his work. Moreover, while some Czechs criticized the shameless way in which the first British production of R.U.R. revised the original, Čapek, himself a dramaturg conscious of the shifting needs of audiences, did not appear offended. He quickly felt that R.U.R., only his second play, was flawed and struggled to understand its popularity, so might well have been open to improvements. I wonder if he fully grasped the prescience of his framing of questions of what it is to be human. For him, they are linked to the narrative of coexistence, cooperation and justice that the ‘small nations’ of post-1918 Europe, or at least Czechoslovakia, sought to bring to the huge empires that had just plunged the world into war. His preoccupation in R.U.R. is more with the human capacity to dehumanise other human beings in order to exploit them, whether the working-class in the production line of Ford and Taylor, or colonial subjects or slaves, than with the technology that imitates and potentially might replace human beings, as in Robota.
Fittingly for a building that houses an institute for ethics in AI alongside traditional humanities departments, Robota focuses squarely on AI, and especially the implications of its anthropomorphism. It thoroughly updates R.U.R. in terms of not only the language and technology of today, but also our mores, assertively embracing Čapek’s tentative but problematic multiculturalism and above all overturning his stereotyping and diminishing of women, which he manages simultaneously to critique and replicate. Čapek seems to have been born middle-aged, and through a mix of parody and reimagining, Robota strips R.U.R of this middle-agedness. It was noticeable how the many under-30s in the audience most enjoyed the jokes about love in the time of digital.
For most of R.U.R., as the robots launch a violent rebellion outside and throughout the world the characters – Helena and the senior managers of the robot-manufacturing company – are trapped in a room, alternately debating what they should do and whose fault it is. It is a profound image of powerlessness that we might recognise in our own situation today, but it can make for heavy watching. While in R.U.R., much of the action that drives the play takes place off-stage and in information passed by one character to another, in Robota, that action is reconfigured in a love story/love triangle that nevertheless ends in apocalypse, which, as the witty metafictional frame points out, these sci-fi tales always seem to do.
I am extremely grateful to Headlong and to those overseeing the Schwarzman Centre’s cultural programme to have had the privilege of witnessing the development of a new production from initial ideas to its astonishing realization. It revealed the extraordinary possibilities for art and knowledge advance that emerge from research and creation interacting in the same space. And I am also thrilled that it was a work of Czech literature that inspired this first adventure.
Rajendra Chitnis
Associate Professor, Czech and Slovak
Robota is playing at the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities until July 18th 2026: https://www.schwarzmancentre.ox.ac.uk/whats-on/robota-fcxq