Čapek as a Robot (caricature by author's brother, Josef Čapek)

R.U.R. has not only made Karel Čapek internationally famous; it has also made him in a certain sense immortal, because of the word “Robot”, which appears in the subtitle and throughout this stage play.

Particularly in its dramatic concluding parts, R.U.R comes closer to the Gothic horror than to science fiction, which in the author’s days was still known as Utopia. As does the next generation of writers in this genre, which  includes for instance George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and some others, Čapek uses the utopian theme mainly to aid his literary aims and to make commentaries on the state of society, which has not changed much since his days. This is why this author’s work is still very much alive, even in the 21^st century. The Robots’ revolt and its consequences could for instance be interpreted as a warning against giving scientists a free hand in pursuit of genetic research. The R.U.R. managers and scientists at every opportunity stress that their noble aims are designed to benefit mankind, but one feels that somewhere down the line perhaps there might be a heavy price to pay.

  The Robber moves between romantic comedy and tragedy, with a pinch of melodrama or even farce thrown in here and there. Some passages are in verse. Čapek began to work on it in 1911, when he was only twenty-one, and he returned to the theme again by the time he was nearing thirty.

Though certainly less successful internationally, the play has proven a big hit with the Czech audiences. Nearly a hundred years after Čapek had begun to work on the first version, a year would hardly roll by without at least one important Czech theatre company coming up with a new production. Čapek himself thought of the Robber as his only “true Czech play”, and apparently he valued it more than his other, technically more advanced and on the world stage certainly more successful plays.