A New World! A World of Robots!
Stop me if you've heard this before: Humanity created a race of superhuman machines to be its servants. They rebelled. They look just like us. There are many copies. And they, um, have a plan. Mostly mindless drones led by a select few who possess free will, intelligence, and passion, they declare an extermination war on humanity - just as humanity is celebrating the cessation of hostilities.
But: they can't reproduce on their own, so they're dependent on their ‘fathers,' humanity, to perpetuate life. They're even starting to develop souls (through the intervention of a stammering scientist driven to inadvertently cause the destruction of the human race because of a woman.) Eventually, they become indistinguishable from humans, developing emotions - fear of death, appreciation of beauty, love - and it looks like they will become humanity's successors, once the last human lives have flickered out.
Hm. This sounds oddly familiar... Oh, right: it's the basic plot of R.U.R.
(Right, and there was that TV series with Tricia Helfer in it, too.)
R.U.R. (Rossom's Universal Robots) is one of the few plays that is probably known by name to more science fiction geeks than any other demographic, simply for the fact that it is the origin of the word ‘robot.' Somewhere in the back of a lot of Asimov fans' minds is the factoid that in Czech, ‘robota' means ‘forced labour,' and that Karel Capek, a Czech playwright "way back then" - "way back then" being 1921 - coined the word ‘robot' and popularized it to the world.
This particular production of R.U.R. is by Sock'n'Buskin Theatre Company, based at Carleton University, and directed by Don Fex. It's playing last weekend and next, at Kailash Mital Theatre (in Southam Hall, I will add to save you the wandering around Carleton's fairly labyrinthine campus.) I stumbled across it by accident, whether because of sparse advertising on the part of the company or the general flying-under-the-radar of Sock'n'Buskin. This is a shame, really - they should be more visible. Small amateur Ottawa theatre companies tend to fall under the vast shadow of the National Arts Centre and the GCTC. Not fair.
Not that this was a flawless show or anything. But it was fun, and there were far too few people in the audience to return the kind of energy that some of the actors on stage were putting out. Zachary Counsil, in particular, who I last saw taking large, enjoyable, juicy bites out of the part of Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer, was producing lovely comic turns and flourishes in the first act as Harry Domin, the owner and director of the robot factory, and you wanted to laugh a little louder to let him know it was working, watch a little harder to generate that audience energy return.
I have to admit, while I respect the influence this play has had on speculative fiction (I spotted prefigurations of Blade Runner and the Terminator movies, of Battlestar Galactica, naturally, and Star Trek's technobabble, in particular) - it probably could have been about an hour shorter. I don't know about the conventions of 1920's Czech drama, but after the first act, which was entertaining enough, the script really starts to drag. Maybe in the early stages of speculative fiction people weren't expected to pick up on a point as easily, meaning the playwrights felt they had to have four long, apostrophizing soliloquies on the same subject? I was reminded of the repetition, over and over again in Fritz Lang's contemporary film Metropolis, of the line, "Between the Head and the Hands, must be the Heart!" Okay, okay, Karel, we get the point, people shouldn't have messed with nature and made robots. Can we have the apocalypse now?
We're in the land of didactic stories, so not much makes sense in this script. Helena Glory (in the translation, at least) appears on the island where they make ‘robots;' artificial people created out of some kind of cloning process. She comes with the intention of inciting the robots to rebel against their situation, but within the first act, inexplicably, she marries Harry Domin, the director of the factory. The other five department heads (who were entertainingly characterized by Keith Cressy, Cody Doble, Troy Ireland, Glenn Simmons, and Allan Meltzer) all simultaneously fall in love with her as well. Jump ahead ten years, and add a robot-fuelled world war that Helena has apparently been kept totally ignorant of. For ten years. Just as the men are staring to celebrate the end of the conflict and the return of progress, they discover that the robots have issued an extermination order on mankind. The robots surround the factory. The humans set up an electrified fence and decide to buy their freedom with the formula for creating new robots. Unfortunately, Helena has just burned it in a badly-thought-out attempt to stop the creation of robots and put an end to the war that was already over anyway. After one highly symbolic death - the accountant tries to buy their way out and dies on the electric fence with billions of dollars lying on his chest - the robots attack and kill everyone but the head of construction (they consider him a robot because he works with his hands.) They keep him in the factory and try to force him to come up with the formula, but as he's a bricklayer, his grasp of biochemistry is pretty tenuous. (There are definite shades of Roy Batty from Blade Runner in this scene, and it's possible that the director chose Kayla Meyer, in all her tall, blond, rangy, angry glory, to play Radius, one of the robot commanders, because she would evoke Rutger Hauer. Which she did with aplomb - I was waiting for her to say, "I want more life, fucker.") Finally he discovers that a robot copy of Helena and another robot named Primus appear to have fallen in love. He sends them off (with quotations from Genesis,) and expires on stage (with quotations from the Nunc Dimittis,) clutching a sterile flower.
I would love to know (it's the sort of thing that it would have been great to have in the program) whether this was the original translation done in London in about 1923. It didn't sound as dated as I might have expected. And the actors delivered it quite comfortably, when they didn't have flights of philosophy to contend with: the script is full of speeches which sound as though the playwright has borrowed the character's body for a moment to point out - again, and in flowery language - the moral lesson. Most of them managed as well as they could with this stuff, awkward and formal as it is, and unnatural by most modern standards. Again, maybe it's the style of the play - it is an odd, expressionist play - or maybe it's the problem of translating from Czech.
Counsil, in particular, as Domin, was the best thing about the show - his glee and pompousness and slight unhingedness were, above all, fun, and he's got an expressive style that gives you a look at what the character's thinking. He's also quite good at comic timing. It's unfortunate that he was playing against a Helena (Sophia Sahota) who seemed essentially to be a one-note actor (that note being ‘shrill.') To be fair, Helena seems to be a one-note character, and her part is irritatingly repetitive, but when a British-raised actor can make a British accent sound fake, there's something weird going on. I was also struck by the fact that when Sahota came back, as a robot version of herself, in the final act, her acting was much more natural and easy, making me wonder if it was a direction call that made her so stiff in the previous acts, or if she just wasn't comfortable in the part. It's too bad, because I wanted to see more of Helena's motivations, since we see the story through her eyes for the most part - the men bustle around for most of the play making veiled references to things they refuse to explain to her, leaving both Helena and the audience in the dark.
The sluggishness of the plot was leavened in this production by comedy, which was, for the most part, well done. The other five men - the ‘directors' - were cast as character types - eccentric genius types for the most part - and played well off each other and around each other. Their blocking, particularly in the last siege scene, worked quite well, and they all managed a quick character sketch of their parts in their first scene. In particular, I liked Keith Cressy's stammer and excitability, and Glenn Simmens's transformation from nerdy biochemist to whisky-infused stagger. Troy Ireland, playing Fabry the Texan (who so closely resembled Quincey Morris from Dracula that he could have been lifted whole cloth from one story to the other) may have relied a little too much in hands-on-hips belt-hitching and omnipresent cowboy hat, but was having fun, and was fun to watch, nonetheless. I was a little put off by Amanda Klaman playing "Nana" - she got a few laughs but I thought that occasionally her clowning only managed to distract from the lines other characters were speaking. The character is a little bizarre - maybe she would make more sense in Czech, but all she could be in this interpretation was a comic, rosary-clutching - and, for some reason, British-accented - spouter of doom.
But it's an ambitious script to tackle - stilted and strange, and I get the feeling Czech is difficult to translate naturally into English. It's packed with repetitive lines and implausible speeches, with a lot of unlikely descriptions of events taking place offstage. ("Look, he's gesturing toward us! What's he saying? I think he must be trying to bargain with the robots! Oh, no, he's falling toward the electric fence! The fool!") Practically all the violence takes place in description, although there was one rather unsettling vivisection scene that took place behind a scrim, only partially visible.
And it's also difficult to imagine what the 1920's concept of a ‘robot' would be - what the audience's and actors' assumptions and expectations would be - when we've had nearly ninety years to come up with the Three Laws, droids, Terminators, and Cylons. Sci-fi, at the time, barely existed yet, and was bundled together with metaphor, fantasy, ‘romance' and a host of other developing types of speculative fiction, and yes, it got preachy, and yes, since then we, as the audience, have gotten more accustomed to figuring out what the metaphor's telling us (and less insistent that the strange fiction we're being told have an explicit lesson in the first place.)
So in places, R.U.R. does seem to drag on in uncalled-for soliloquies and overwrought language. But in other places, it still has sparkle, particularly in its comic moments, in the way the men discuss the whole problem of the robot rebellion in ellipsis, around Helena and the audience, leaving us to infer, and in the development of the besieged characters in the factory. And for a science fiction fan like me, it's also a landmark: one of the only, if not
the only, science fiction play to actually succeed - as, in its way, it does - as science fiction. Impressive, after 87 years.
Posted by Kathryn Hunt
at 9:15 PM EST