Basil Rathbone: R.U.R.

A fantastic melodrama by Karel Capek. Translated by Paul Selver, adapted by Nigel Playfair. Opened at St. Martin's Theatre, London, April 24, 1923. After 127 performances, the play closed on August 11, 1923. Produced by Basil Dean.

General Manager: E. P. Clift; Deputy Manager: Roger Ould; Assistant Producer: S. E. Percy; Musical Director: Morton Stephenson; Stage Manager: A. Bernard Ince; Asst. Stage Managers: Vere Bennett, John F. Barham; Stage Superintendent: Albert Jones; Engineer: J. Appleford; Property Master: T. Morgan; Assistant Property Master: W. Drabwell; Electricians: H. McDonnell, Walter Veness; Carpenter: J. Foster; Wardrobe Mistress: Mrs. F. W. Stock; Box Office Managers: J. W. Clifford Brown, C. Wood; Scenery, Costume design: George W. Harris; Costumes: B. J. Simmons, Berthe, Zyrot

R. U. R. is a story of the world’s repopulation with artificial beings. The initials R. U. R. stand for Rossum's Universal Robots, a company that manufactures robots by the thousands and ships them all over the world. The robots look exactly like humans, but they have no soul, no feelings. They are being used as laborers, so that human beings will no longer have to toil. Rathbone plays Harry Domain, the manager of the company. Domain predicts:

Could it be that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry read R. U. R. and was influenced by it? Roddenberry's vision of the 24th century is a world without poverty, in which people work not to earn money, but to better themselves. ("The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We seek to better ourselves and the rest of humanity." —Captain Picard, Star Trek: First Contact)

Helena Glory, the daughter of the company's president, visits the factory and talks to some of the robots about how they are treated. She represents the Humanity League, which has two hundred thousand members who are outraged over the slavery of the robots. Helena cannot understand how the robots can put up with it. But they are not impressed. Liberation means nothing to them.

In spite of Helena's feelings about the misuse of the robots, she and Harry Domain fall in love and marry.

Act II takes place ten years later, and Domain’s predictions have not come true. The governments of different countries have turned the robots into soldiers and taught them to kill humans. There have been many wars and the robots have killed hundreds of thousands of people. Lately the robots have revolted and issued a manifesto: "The first international organization of Rossum's Universal Robots proclaim man as our enemy and an outlaw in the universe. Robots throughout the world, we command you to kill all mankind. Spare no men! Spare no women! Save factories, railways, machinery, mines and raw materials. Destroy the rest!"

The robots on the island attack the office and kill all the humans save one. The robots do not know how to produce more robots, and need the human to show them how. Unfortunately for them, the human they spared was an engineer, not one of the scientists who produced robots, so he's unable to help. Also, the document containing the secret of the robots' manufacture was destroyed shortly before the attack. So one year later 8 million robots have "failed" (died) and no new ones have been created.

The play ends with two of the newest Robots, Helena and Primus, discovering that they have feelings for each other. So perhaps they'll find another way to reproduce.

[The plot summary above is adapted from The Best Plays of 1922-23, ed. by Burns Mantle (Dodd, Mead and Co., 1923), pages 343-382.]

Karel Capek's play premiered in Prague in 1921, and ran for 63 performances. The following year Paul Selver translated the play from Czech into English. The American première was at the Garrick Theatre in New York City on October 9, 1922, where it ran for 184 performances. London playgoers first saw R. U. R. at St. Martin's Theatre on April 24th, 1923. The production ran for 126 performances in London and then went on tour throughout England. Basil Rathbone was part of the London cast only, and did not go on tour with R. U. R. When the play closed on August 11, 1923, Rathbone left London and returned to New York. He had a leading role in The Swan when that play opened in October 1923.

Based on a conflict between human heroes and robots, R. U. R. was translated into 30 languages and produced in Berlin, Warsaw, Riga, Paris, London, Moscow, and New York.

R. U. R. is known for having introduced the word "Robot" into the language. The word is derived from a Czech word that means both worker and serf or peasant. The Robots in the play are mass-produced workers.

WHEN MACHINES BECOME MEN

Even although it is not a home-grown play, I am glad to see that "R. U. R." at St. Martin's Theatre is flourishing. every night the pretty little house is filled, and with people of social consequence as well as the discerning of the middle and working classes, who are the backbone of every theatre that pays its way. If the cheaper seats are not filled, no house can carry on. Wherefore it is pleasant to see an enthusiastic audience, in addition to the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland, Lord and Lady Louis Mountbatten, and others equally notable. And good to se them also and their appreciation. Mr. Basil Dean, to whom the London stage has profound reason to be grateful, appears once more to have found a winner in "Rossum's Universal Robots." The author, Karel Capek, preaches to stern effect; he makes us leave the theatre thinking, I do not believe, nor does anyone else, that man well ever be able to put breath of life, a soul, into any mechanism he can make, but he can do so much with machinery. Too much, a great many of us thought, during the late war. Mechanism with a mind and brain of its own; how ghastly! I have not seen a play for years that held the attention of the audience so rigidly, and Mr. Capek is no less well served by his adaptor, Mr. Nigel Playfair, than by his company of actors.

—The Gloucester Echo, May 2, 1923

"Three major threads underlie RUR: first, the response to the tremendous loss of life during the First World War as a result of technology; second, the debate between capitalism and communism about labour and the ideal society; and, finally, the desire to usurp God by creating life. The atrocities of the First World War made the concept of Robot soldiers particularly provocative for theatre audiences who had just survived a war with nine million deaths and millions more wounded. Everyone in the audience would have known someone who died as a result of the war and the idea of robot replacements for soldiers would have been compelling. The First World War was the bloodiest war up to that point in history. It was a war full of new technologies: tanks, grenades, mortar bombs, machine guns, poison mustard gas, and zeppelins. Battle photographs captured the visceral images of the wounded and the dead, bringing them directly into people's homes via newspaper, also for the first time. Past wars had been visually recorded as paintings, drawing, woodcuts, etchings, or even daguerreotypes, none of which could capture the brutality of war with the same intensity as a photograph. All of these new technologies made people suddenly aware of the very real possibility of the destruction of the human race by its own machine-based creations." —K. Reilly, Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History, 2011

The critics praised Basil Rathbone's performance as the company manager, Harry Domain.

A trivia tidbit: Beatrix Thomson, who played Sulla in R. U. R. (see photos above), married Claude Rains in 1924; they remained married until 1935. Claude played Prince John in The Adventures of Robin Hood.

THE THRILLS OF R.U.R. AT THE ST. MARTIN'S

It looks as if R.U.R., the work of the Czecho-Slovak playwright, Karel Capek, will prove to be the play of the year. There is no question of its originality and power, notwithstanding its resemblance to some of the Wellsian fantasies. It brings into the stale atmosphere of our theatre freshness of imagination, no little solid thought, the thrill of apprehension and terror, a grim not of satire at the expense of our civilisation and so-called progress; it is drama or melodrama—what matters the distinction?—which broaches a stupendous idea, and works its audience up to more and more breathless excitement over a spectacle of human bankruptcy and defeat more ghastly than the gloomiest visions of Armageddon. Its story is that of Frankenstein and the monster which destroyed its maker extended to a world-wide scale. The Robots of R.U.R.—machines originally made in human shape to save human labour (and fill a few capitalists' pockets) but gradually given human feelings because they damage themselves too recklessly and uneconomically, and at last so consistently improved that they become a sort of short-lived supermen in thraldom—are supposed to rise in revolt against humanity, and, turning its won weapons on it, to make a clean sweep of its millions, until only half a dozen of our species remain on an island under siege awaiting heir end. The author's hypothesis, of course, calls for a great deal of make-believe: we have to credit mankind through the continents with an extraordinary impotence under the menace of such a catastrophe, and far too much is made to depend on the fate of a document which contains the secret of the Robots' manufacture and is burnt by the heroine. But the curtain at the close of the second act, in which the six doomed human beings hear form without the war-cry of the rebels sounding like the eeriest and most hideous of siren-calls, is one of the most impressive and harrowing situations our theatre has known for many a day; and nearly the whole of the following act, quietly tense for the most part, with explosions of panic or passion, keeps up to the high level of this scene. Far below it, dropping almost to bathos, is the sequel, in which a Robot and a Robotess, as new Adam and Eve, discover love, and therefore humanity's real secret, to the joy of the sole survivor of mankind; but the rest of the play has been too powerful for such lapse into conventional sentiment to spoil it. Mr. Basil Dean has produced a fine thing finely, his lighting and scenic effects being notably helpful; and at least half-a-dozen fine pieces of acting—from Mr. Basil Rathbone (never showing before such nervous strength), Mr. C. V. France, Mr. Brember Wills, Mr. Clifford Mollison, Miss Frances Carson (anxiety to the life), Miss Ada King, and above all, and most imaginative of all, Mr. Leslie Banks—dignify a play which deserves all that could be done for it by acting.

—The Illustrated London News, May 5, 1923

"There is one 'gripping' moment, when the Robots come to exterminate the last four human beings left on earth. Besides this moment, the horror lies more in the dramatist's idea than in the dramatic action of his play. But the play is also an allegory of the human race. The Robots are but the workers, whom the employers have given the chance of education — and in giving them that chance have made them discontented, ambitious, finally, more powerful than the employers themselves. And the moral is that you cannot keep a man a 'Robot' if you give him leisure to cultivate his intelligence. Only the ignorant and savage are contented by their lot. Some people will read into the author's intention another significance. That is the interest of his play. It makes one think." —Arkay, The Tatler, May 16, 1923

"The much-heralded Czech play, R.U.R., adapted from Karel Capek by Nigel Playfair, and produced by Basil Dean at the St. Martin's, proved an interesting and thrilling affair. It is frankly described as a 'fantastic melodrama,' and the dullest playgoer could not but be interested in the manner of the Robots' manufacture and their terrific, overwhelming revenge on humanity." —The People, April 29, 1923

"Mr. Basil Dean's production, as always, is arresting and provocative. The general stage pictures are good, especially the backcloth of the Robot factory. ... The Robots are well dressed, well drilled, well acted (notably by Mr. Leslie Banks, who can grip his audience as quickly as any actor of our stage). ... The use of siren-blasts is weird and wonderful, and induces the needful touch of hysteria. The human actors are not so successfully produced." —Ashley Dukes, The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, May 5, 1923

"An exciting, thrilling play, which everyone will enjoy. ... Mr. Basil Rathbone looked very handsome as Harry Domain, but acted stiffly." —The Spectator, May 5, 1923

"Mr. Basil Rathbone did very pleasantly and manfully. ... No one should miss this most interesting play." —James Agate, The Saturday Review, May 5, 1923

"The London first-night audience was roused to a great pitch of enthusiasm over the play and prolonged the applause at the final curtain. The critics describe the piece as a genuine thriller which will set London talking and much praise is bestowed on the acting, especially that of Miss Frances Carson, who plays the role of Helena Glory." —The New York Times, April 29, 1923

"Mr. Leslie Banks as a Robot of unusual stature and uncomfortable intelligence was one of the greatest successes of the evening. Other honours went to Mr. Basil Rathbone." —The Westminster Gazette, April 25, 1923

The Strange Robots

Summertime may be bad for the theatre, but the theatres have been very good to us lately—most recently in the St. Martin's production of Karel Capek's curiously named play, R.U.R.—otherwise Rossum's Universal Robots—a poetic parable told in the terms of thrillingly ingenious melodrama. The Robots—whose origin has a long literary ancestry—are mechanical men and women who can work like slave without resentment. But the manufacturers turned out too many, and one of the producers made a few so human that they roused all the other Robots into rebellion, heralded by a siren which makes you sweat terror at the St. Martin's, amid much very clever stage management and lighting. The thing simply grips you.

The acting is wonderfully impressive, most of all Mr. Leslie Bankes's unforgettable picture of a rebellious Robot, full of an energy which he cannot quite realise. Mr. Basil Rathbone, as the manager of the factory, and Mr. C. V. France, as his chief inventor, are good; and there is a fine touch of poetry about another, played by Mr. Brember Wills, who rings the curtain impressively down on the Book of Genesis. That fine actress, Miss Ada King, as a lady's maid, and Miss Frances Carson. as the idealist who prompts Dr. Gull to humanise his Robots —to the undoing of herself and her Jew fellow-humans— are admirable. R.U.R. is gripping. It forms a very interesting twin study to the Scala marionettes, which are really Robots without even flesh and blood.

—The Graphic, May 5, 1923

"Here is our old friend Frankenstein and the monster, stripped of nearly all the horror, and cleverly brought up to date—a perfectly engrossing play, giving you furiously to think. It has been endowed by the genius of Basil Dean, with a suggestive scenic surrounding. ... Mr. Basil Rathbone's the manager, Miss Frances Carson as his eventual wife, and Mr. C. V. France as the scientific director, were curiously well chosen and efficient." —The Era, May 2, 1923

"The parts of Domain, Gall, and Berman, mere pale, ineffectual mortals, and with sympathy diverted by Capek from them to the machines, all gave excellent opportunities for good acting to Messrs. Basil Rathbone, Charles V. France, and Clifford Mollison." —The Stage, April 26, 1923

"Mr. Dean has bestowed upon the play the fanciful setting it demands—the view of the factory where human automatons are made is as eerie as the theme; the acting calls for unstinted praise; the sincerity of Basil Rathbone, of C. V. France, of Ada King, of Frances Carson (whose every step means advance), carries us away." —The Sketch, May 9, 1923

"Capek has written an extraordinarily good melodrama, and cleverly touched it up so that it will make an appeal to the highbrow person with a soul above melodrama." —The Midland Daily Telegraph, April 26, 1923

"It is a remarkable play, skilfully interpreted by such artists as Mr. Basil Rathbone, Mr. Gilbert Ritchie, Miss Frances Carson, Mr. C. V. France, Mr. Brember Wills, Mr. Clifford Mollison, Miss Ada King, Mr. Leslie Banks, Miss Olia Lindo, and Mr. Ian Hunter, and it had an enthusiastic reception." —The Scotsman, April 26, 1923

"R.U.R., at the St. Martins, is an outstanding play. It provides both a tense emotional and dramatic atmosphere and an appeal to the intellect. Karel Capek's patriotism of mankind, his passionate grief at the idea that man might perish, leads one to a further question: Would it matter? A fine play, finely acted." —M. E., The Daily Herald, April 25, 1923