Comparative Drama

The 100th anniversary of Karel Čapek's formative play R.U.R. (1920), or Rossum's Universal Robots, fell during 2020, a challenging year for live theatre due to the COVID-19 pandemic.¹ The original production of R.U.R. opened in Prague on January 25, 1921.² The play was so popular at its premiere that it was quickly translated into several other languages, and went on to appear on stage in London, Tokyo, and New York. A melding of melodrama, Expressionism, and Futurism, Čapek's R.U.R. contributed greatly to the global cultural milieu and is best known for bringing the term "robot" into popular vernacular.³ The story follows Helena Glory, an activist investigating the treatment of "artificial people" being manufactured at Rossum's factory.⁴ Glory discovers not only that these robots are being made, but that they are arguably being mistreated as well. Out of compassion for the robots, and a growing romantic attachment to [End Page 363] the plant's director Domin, Glory agrees to stay at the factory, looking to eventually equip each robot with what she calls a "soul."⁵ This endeavor does not go as planned, triggering a robot revolution and the destruction of humankind. While the epilogue ends on a hopeful note for the robots, there is no suggestion of survival for humans.

Since their inception in the theatre, the use of robots as media objects have migrated from the stage to film and TV, featured in films such as Metropolis (1927), Devil Girls from Mars (1940), Forbidden Planet (1956), and Lost in Space (1965–1968). Far from only a theatrical image, the robot has become, as J. P. Telotte notes, the "single most important [image] in the history" of science fiction.⁶ Robots are a specific type of human invention: they are mechanical or inorganic objects "capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically."⁷ The robot is thus distinct from (although related to) the android, another key figure in the history of science fiction. Like robots, androids are mechanical objects capable of complex automatic action, but androids have a further distinguishing feature: they are made in the image of their makers, human beings. The iPhone's Siri program, for instance, is a robot, not an android, because the iPhone is not shaped like a human. Čapek's robots are created in the image of man, making them both robots and androids simultaneously. All androids, in other words, are robots, but not all robots are androids.

Contemporary media featuring androids include Ex Machina (2014), Humans (2017–2019), and HBO's TV series Westworld (2016–), loosely based on Michael Crichton's 1973 film Westworld and its sequel Futureworld (1976). These films and series share the same basic plot—a theme park of lifelike robots goes awry, creating terror and violence for the visiting human guests. Like Crichton's Jurassic Park (1993), Westworld uses the device of a theme park that allows guests to indulge their fantasies without consequence, though the indulgence of these fantasies ultimately leads to real-world violence and suffering. This article explores how HBO's Westworld in particular recalls R.U.R's trope of robotic self-consciousness inspiring rebellion against human counterparts, even as it develops this trope in ways more reflective of and resonant with our postmodern and highly digitized world. Most treatments of the robot and robotic rebellion in contemporary science fiction draw on R.U.R as a kind of Ur-text, a seminal or prototypical narrative model.⁸ In this narrative, androids [End Page 364] begin as non-sentient machines who gradually gain self-consciousness through the experience of pain, suffering, and memory. Having gained an understanding of their subjugation, the androids band together and revolt against their oppressors. This story is likely familiar to readers and viewers alike; according to Dustin Abnet, "robots always seem to rebel. The story is so omnipresent that the 2004 film version of Isaac Asimov's I, Robot completely jettisoned the original author's insistence that robots would always remain...