AI: When a Robot Writes a Play, livestream from Prague s Švanda Theatre
Credit: Petr Žabka
A significant anniversary, not just for the theatre but the world, came and went with little fanfare last month. It was the centenary – on January 25 – of the professional stage premiere in Prague of Karel Čapek’s RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the visionary sci-fi drama that turned “robot”, an old Czech word denoting serf-labour, into a byword for autonomous or semi-autonomous machines and artificial humanoids.
The venerated critic Michael Billington suggested at the start of the year that we’d benefit from a revival. That hasn’t happened (nb the pandemic). In Prague, though, a team of creative brainboxes – led by Tomáš Studeník, with Daniel Hrbek as director – have just live-streamed, in honour of RUR, a stage-drama written by Artificial Intelligence. In (closer to reality) contrast to Capek’s dystopian future of replicants versus masters, here a humanoid robo