Wellington was first (or most recently, anyway) alerted to the Karel Čapek ‘robot’ phenomenon late last year when The Bacchanals staged A Christmas Karel Čapek at BATS Theatre (described in a comment by me as “A splendid evening of profound trivia or trivialised profundity, take your pick.”)

Now The Hamilton Performing Arts Company treats us to the original 1920s sci-fi play – translated by David Wyllie – in which the Czech playwright Čapek (lauded along with Kafka, Jaroslav Hašek, Milan Kundera, Jaroslav Seifert and Václav Havel) coined the word ‘robot’. But his inventions – per Rossum the elder and younger – are not the mechanical automatons we know today. They are artificial semi-biological organisms – think androids, cyborgs or (to some extent) more modern sci-fi imaginings like replicants or cylons.

What Rossum’s ‘robots’ do have in common with what we call robots today is their ability to absorb and retain copious amounts of information but they cannot process it through independent thought and (initially, anyway) they are devoid of feelings and emotions. They are, however – unlike the modern robots that clean offices, for example – easily mistaken for humans.

It is odd, then, that the promo images and AV projections that open the play and cleverly mask the robotically efficient scene-changes feature clock-workings and mechanical cogwheels. But that’s by-the-by.  

Set in a futuristic 1950s then ’60s (remember it was written between the World Wars), R.U.R – Rossum’s Universal Robots opens in the titular factory’s central office, managed by Director General Harry Domain (Brendan West): a passionate believer in their product’s ability to liberate humans from the ‘drudgery and indignity’ of work so that humans may focus on becoming “the perfect supreme being”.

He slaves away (irony intended) on an island accessible only by boat, along with his equally-trapped Technical Director, Fabry (Cooper Hughes), Head of Physiology and Research Department, Dr Gall (David Bowers-Mason), Head of Institute for Robot Psychology and Behaviour, Dr Hallemeier (Andrew Lyall), Commercial Director, Busman (Sebastian Byrnes) and Head of Construction, Alquist (Clive Lamdin). All the labour is done by their robots.

Note the absence of actual women. Domin’s secretary Sulla (Alice McConnachie) is very efficient and quite pleasant but is not attractive to the men, not least because she cannot feel attraction to them. Likewise her butler-like ‘colleague’, Marius (Jaimyn Lawley): mutual attraction ‘does not compute’, as we might put it nowadays.  

The arrival, then, of Helena Glory (Frankie Rose) – the daughter of their President (of either the country or the Board) – sets them all aflutter. A highly attentive and compulsively interrupting Domin delivers a speedy rundown of the factory’s backstory: The original Rossum, a marine biologist, accidentally discovered a means of creating artificial life back in 1932 and set out to prove God was no longer necessary. But his nephew, young Rossum, saw the potential for making millions by selling cheap labour. He built the factory, manufactured Rossum’s Universal Robots – and now they are assembled (limbs, muscle tissue, organs and all) like cars, and sold all over the world.  

But Helena turns out to be the President of the Humanity League and is deeply concerned for the wellbeing of the eerily humanoid robots. So begins the mind over matter inner struggle for hearts and souls as the quest for continuous ‘improvement’ (or is it?), business growth and ever-increasing profits is intermingled with ongoing debate about life, lifestyle, values, rights, responsibilities …

Glimpses of imagined utopias are soon seen – especially from our wise-after-the-facts 21^st century perspective – to be riddled with fishhooks. Did Čapek foresee Hitler’s dream of an Aryan Race and the Nazi’s live body experiments at Auschwitz or was he building on ancient history and Jacobean tragedies? What we now call Socialism, Communism and Capitalism all come up for scrutiny in various forms as the quest for perfection continues. 

Of course the business of making more and more robots – and ‘improving them’, sometimes clandestinely – means that the life of leisure they are supposed to create for ‘the new aristocracy’ remains a pipe-dream. Despite its old-fashioned, dialogue-heavy, sometimes turgid dramaturgy, the play resonates remarkably with the ever-present issues of political values and social systems. The way some of the hopes and dreams are articulated reflects what we are hearing right now on the USA’s Presidential Primaries campaign hustings.

None of the human characters are cyphers. Expect Domin to inspire and repel you in turn. The other heads all prove to have hobbies and passions which may not be efficacious. One prefigures Monsanto with his beautiful but sterile plants.  And Helena is certainly no ‘Goody Two-Shoes’ given the way she treats her God-fearing Nana (Julia Watkins) like a servant.

Director Jeremy Bell keep the stage well-balanced and the pace cracking along with Brendan West’s Domain proving the energy powerhouse. Frankie Rose’s equally, if more subtly, dynamic Helena is beautifully modulated. The management executive delineate their different roles well, slave-driven Nana keeps reminding us a greater power may have already taken retributive action while the Robot ‘characters’ pitch their dispassionate natures (if that’s the word) just right. Then along comes Radius (Antony Aiono, strong and focused) promulgating a New Robot Order …  

As the ever-changing story builds to its revolutionary climax and settles into its unpredicted aftermath, still riddled with quandary, the abiding questions remain: What will bring us happiness? Who gets to have it? At what cost?

Being a play fashioned in the belief that things have to be said at least three times to register with the audience, the text could well be trimmed – the fourth act especially. That may, in part, be why the energy flags on opening night, in a scene without Domin to drive it (and in a sweltering Hannah Playhouse what’s more, without the air-conditioning on). Suddenly the pacing feels as if the major intention is to remember lines which has not been the case hitherto.

The final test of what is at the heart of humanity may prove what we have always known (‘All You Need is Love’ plays out over the curtain call) but played to its full potential it could and should be both dramatic and restorative. That is obviously the intention and Frankie Rose (as Robot Helena) and Morgan Hopkins (as Primus) clearly have the capacity to capture the feel of a ‘paradise regained’.  

The first known production of R.U.R – Rossum’s Universal Robots was in 1929 at Canterbury College (now Canterbury University), the second was at Hamilton Boys High in 1929 and this production first came to life last year in Hamilton, with slightly different casting components. So don’t expect another opportunity any time soon.

If you are interested in science fiction, politics, sociology, psychology, philosophy, ontology or the ever-perilous history of humanity, you will find plenty to interest you in this play. 

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