“What do you think makes the best worker? Loyalty? Honestly? No! The lowest cost. Having the fewest needs.”

“A robot.”

I have always wanted to read “R.U.R.” As the originator of the term “robot” – coined off the page, as I learned from this adaptation’s intro, by Karel Čapek’s brother Josef – it has long lingered as an Ur-text for a genre I Iove so much and yet, it does not get much love here in the US. Oh sure, it was popular when it first came out, but the years have seen it slip into obscurity save as a bit of trivia. After reading Kateřina Čupová’s masterful adaptation, I cannot fathom why this is not a more widely read work.

Perhaps this will be the start of its resurgence.

“R.U.R,” or Rossum’s Universal Robots, is a play written in 1921. It tells a simple story of a world transformed by a new marvel, the Robot: untiring, lacking emotions, a simulacrum of a human made from meat and wire and a mysterious goo. Yet all is not well, in spite of Director Domin’s promises of a workless paradise, and revolution is on the horizon. Bloody, deadly, revolution. A revolution in three acts and a prologue: the Prologue lays the groundwork, Act 1 is the eve, Act 2 is the fall, and Act 3 is the aftermath.

The core themes of Čapek’s original play are, frustratingly, maddeningly, more relevant now than when it first came out. We are seeing the poisoned, fetid fruits of the computer revolution as he was seeing the fruits of the industrial (yes, yes. The second industrial.) Čupová does much to ensure that timelessness is not lost in adapting the play and that it feels like an adaptation of the original, not a reimagined modern take. This may sound counterintuitive but in preserving the prescience of the play, its satire becomes more potent, more accessible, and more illuminating.

This is Čupová’s great strength as an adapter, surgically updating as needed and leaving the rest alone. It is subtle, for instance, how Čupová melds the 1920s vision of the near future and a 2020s vision. When Helena, our focal character, steps off the ship onto the island where Rossum’s factory is, she is asked to remove her veil. Čupová renders this not as physical lace but as a blue filter emanating from her triangular hair clip, which leads into the rest of the exchange with Domin, where she asks “don’t you trust me?” while removing the veil and giving a look of playful annoyance and, perhaps, nervous avoidance.

Implied in this tete-a-tete is that her veil is both a means of concealing who she is (the original meaning) as well as a potential surreptitious recording device (the new, added meaning) which, on a secretive island full of proprietary processes, would be a big no-no. We recognize this as a future potentially close at hand rather than a future once past, yet the aesthetics, gender roles and the assumptions therein, etc. remain that of yesteryear. One can see this elsewhere, such as in the construction of the robots. True to the original’s mechanized, gooey process, it is now intertwined with circuitry that is more reminiscent of decades of computerized, mechanized real-world and sci-fi “robot” manufacturing.

Helena and Domin’s characterizations in that scene do receive a welcomed update. For Helena, it reduces some of the petulance of the original, emphasizing her wit and playfulness such that it contrasts with the naivete born of her class position (President’s Daughter.) For Domin, his condescension is more awkward, less overtly threatening, though he remains self-absorbed, egotistical, the perfect image of the marginally charismatic Suit with the ethos of a modern technocratic Silicon Valley mogul.

I would be remiss not to credit Julie Nováková here as the translator. None of the nuance of these scenes would be possible without her deft interpretations of Čupová’s re-rendering of Čapek’s work. That it flows, that it is readable as both play dialog – which has a specific rhythm and cadence – and natural comic dialog ensures the work shines and is not marred by misinterpretation.

Lest I forget that this is comics and not the stage, Čupová takes full advantage of the medium to tell the story in ways the stage could never. Space and time are malleable, allowing her to juxtapose past conversations against present action, intercutting between them in such a way that it looks like the two pages opposite each other got jumbled up. Most are simple in this way. 

My favorite sequence of Act 1 is a touch more complex. It has us tumbling through three or four conversations, with Nana, with Alquist, with Gerry and Radius and Domin, the lines between each blurring as we read. Even with Čupová differentiating each conversation by its coloring – blue, red, purple, yellow – it’s easy to read it all as one continuous thread, building tension and laying the groundwork for Heleana’s first and only act of true defiance. It is the emotional climax of the act, though the dramatic climax comes later.

All of this is rendered in a mix of mid-century modern and expressionist designs reminiscent of Czech animation. Characters are only lightly shaded, with simple shapes comprising their design. Button eyes. Rounded, gangly limbs. Hair floats like droplets in a lava lamp. Sometimes the softness that characterizes the work calcifies into harsh angles and stark profiles, flattened like a propaganda poster from the USSR.

The watercolors that color the comic offer a subjective, malleable look rather than a painterly, realist one. It aids in the dreamlike nature of the work, allowing scenes to be awash in harsh colors as befits its mood. It is captivating to behold, honoring the roots of the work and bringing it to life on the page. Perhaps it is only revelatory to me because it is uncommon, here and now.

Čupová’s work is also deliberately rough around the edges. Watercoloring is an inherently imprecise art, though one look at a page and it’s clear that there is nothing imprecise about her skill. In fact, all her lines are similarly precisely imprecise. Panel borders wobble. Word balloons morph like clouds in the sky, their tails miniscule and breaking in one panel, and trailing between balloons like ephemeral connections in another. The hand of the artist peaks through, reaffirming “R.U.R.’s” assertions about the value of human work. 

Value. What do we value, and how do we as people, as society, as humanity express it? That is a key question “R.U.R.” is concerned with and one that gets lost in the narrative of “this is the robot play.” Why were the robots created? How are they used? The literal premise must be accepted and explored because, if they are purely metaphor, the other critiques and explorations are rendered empty and obsolete. The robot cannot only be a stand-in for what mechanization does to people and, indeed, it is not.

What of the humans, then? Helena’s internal conflict is one of class affiliations. She has sympathy for the robots via her work in the League of Humanity but when push comes to shove, she aligns herself not with the robots – as Alquist continually does – but Domin, symbolized by her marriage at the end of the prologue. She remains at odds with the rest throughout Act 2 – being a woman one more indicator of said otherness to the directors – but, spoilers, there is a reason only Alquist reappears in Act 3.

Moving back to the robots, through a purely Marxist lens, “R.U.R’s” robots ARE the working class, only seen by the bosses – the holders of capital and literally the means of production (Rossum’s formulas) – as valuable through their ability to work for them, to be “productive.” People turned into machines by removing what makes them people: “…the need to perform useless tasks. To go for a walk, or to play the violin. To feel joy.”

Yes, objects become cheaper but, as Alquist, clad in the uniform of the robots, the only “working class” director, points out, it also leaves workers penniless. Thus, the cheapness of the goods only benefits those reaping the rewards and all others are left worse off than before, only the perception that things are “better” because things are cheaper remaining.

However, to say the comic is purely a morality tale of capitalism’s failings, or a repudiation of revolutionary sentiment (which is a far more malignant misreading of Radius and seen by the state of the world in Act 3,) or even a tragedy, is to misread its central arguments.

“R.U.R.” has great sympathy for the humans in that factory board room, even as it skewers their ideologies and greedy shortsightedness, though this sympathy is reserved for Act 2. Act 1 ends (sort of) on Domin’s plans to create more factories and create artificial divisions between the robots. It’s a moment that literally warps Helena’s world and, I would hope, any reader unfamiliar with history, labor or otherwise.

Čupová does an incredible job conveying this unusual tension, constantly see-sawing between Radius, the leader of the factory’s revolution, at the gates and the various directors as their world narrows. In one moment of candor, Domin says this:

Devil take the shareholders! You think I’d spare even an hour to work for them? I did it for myself. I wanted each man to become a master. To live for something beyond a loaf of bread. For no soul to suffer by other people’s machines. For nothing to remain of this awful social structure! I loathe humiliation, pain, and poverty. I wanted to- I thought…I wanted free and boundless humans. And perhaps more than humans…

Domin did believe building robots was the right thing to do for humanity, though perhaps he’s only saying this now that it is the end. Regardless, he fell prey to the fallacy at the heart of the capitalist system, one which Radius, looking more and more like Domin with each reappearance, also falls prey to: “I don’t want a master. I want to be a master of others.”

This desire for domination, for winning by making sure others lose, is “R.U.R.’s” most salient critique of capitalism but also of humanity. Radius learned how to be human via the board, via the books the board kept – books on war and finance and capital. Knowledge of how to build, how to create, was hoarded and hidden, segmented and separated.

What happens when a society looks to this as its model? To the Domins of the world? When we wave away the cost of a transition and fail to ask who benefits and why they are the ones most dismissive?

Red blood pouring, rising from the streets, swallowing us whole, while the towering blue bloods walk away unperturbed, until the tide is too great and swallows them up as well. The human story, ended; though life…life lives on without us.