This year’s play will be Rossum’s Universal Robots (R. U. R.) written in 1920 by Karel Čapek. The play was originally written in Czech with the title of Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti and plays a pivotal role in history as it introduced the word robot to English.

This play, written during the post-WWI era, is based on Čapek’s desire to warn about the danger of machines. After living through the then-harshest war in history, Čapek saw the rapid development of weapons. RUR takes place on an island where lifelike robots are assembled and set out to reduce the amount of manual labor done by people. However, the play does not let itself remain as simple as this. With representatives for robot freedom as well as a robotic revolt, themes like what determines what is alive and not, how we should treat artificial intelligence, and how developing technology can be dangerous are grappled with. 

For the cast’s preparation for the play, they aim to bring a more modern appeal to it, working on removing dated ideas of misogyny, and bringing out more of each character. 

Kody Mitchell is playing Radius, the main robot antagonist (at least at face value) of the play. In his role he will try to make the robots seem more based in the AIs we see today by being “more observant than aggressive”, at least at the start. He believes that in the original, the focus of Radius was not on the threat of artificial intelligence, but on technology as a concept. While this made sense for the time because RUR was the first occurrence of the word robot, he hopes to modernize this aspect of the play, making it more pertinent to us.

Eric Ding, playing Domin, the main character, spoke of Domin’s ego. This ego elevated the philosophical conflict between Domin and Helena, the female lead. One key argument Eric spoke of was how they both defined humanity; Domin argued that, unlike robots, humans enjoyed things and didn’t live to work which is what made them human, while Helena argued that it wasn’t necessary to enjoy things to be human. 

The themes that will be in discussion in RUR remain increasingly relevant today, with the seemingly unending developments in artificial intelligence. Per Eric, “it’s a serious and philosophical play where the audience is invited to answer based on their own interpretations.” 

Friends Academy’s rendition of Rossum’s Universal Robots will be free to view for FA students sometime in November.