Before the Curtain

1921 · The Robot on Stage · Work 1118 of 1,871

The stage of a large theatre in Prague on a January afternoon before a rehearsal, the auditorium in deep shadow, an office set of painted canvas flats in cold grey and pale green, tall window frames onto a painted backdrop of factory chimneys, two headless tailor's dummies in plain grey-blue linen work tunics, one bare work lamp throwing hard light across the boards, and standing alone beside the dummies the man, a slim Czech man of thirty, dark hair brushed back from a high forehead, clean-shaven, in a dark wool three-piece suit and dark patterned tie, his face toward the camera in three-quarter view.

Who
Karel Čapek (1890–1938) was a Czech writer, playwright and journalist, and he gave the world the word "robot". Born on 9 January 1890 in Malé Svatoňovice in Bohemia, the son of a country doctor, he suffered all his life from a disease of the spine. He studied philosophy in Prague, Berlin and Paris and in 1917 settled in Prague as a writer and journalist. Much of his work he wrote together with his brother Josef, a painter. In plays and novels he asked where science and technology might tempt humankind: in "R.U.R." (1920) and in the novel "War with the Newts" (1936). He was a friend of President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, recorded his "Conversations" and stood up for democracy. Against the threat from Hitler's Germany he wrote "The White Disease" (1937) and "The Mother" (1938). He was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died of pneumonia on 25 December 1938, a few months after the Munich Agreement. Josef was arrested by the Gestapo on 1 September 1939 and died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945.
The moment
On 25 January 1921 "R.U.R." opened at the National Theatre in Prague. Čapek had begun writing the play for this stage early in 1920; in November 1920 it came out as a book from Aventinum, with a woodcut cover by Josef. It is set in the factory of the Rossum company, which produces artificial workers. Čapek needed a word for them. He first thought of "laboři" and asked his brother. "Tak jim řekni roboti", then call them robots, Josef mumbled with the brush in his mouth, and went on painting. Because the Prague premiere was postponed and an amateur company in Hradec Králové never heard about it, they performed the play first, on 2 January 1921. In Prague it stayed in the repertoire for six years, and tickets sold on the black market. The picture shows Čapek alone on the stage on a January afternoon before a rehearsal. The two tailor's dummies in work tunics stand for the robots of the play.
The other side
Čapek's robots were not machines but industrially produced beings made of living tissue; today one would rather call them androids. The word passed to something other than what he had described. In the play the creatures destroy their creators. The left-wing avant-garde in Czechoslovakia accused him of merely seizing a catchy subject, sophisticated kitsch for an international audience. According to the Slavist William E. Harkins, Čapek himself liked this play least of all his dramas: "Anyone could have written it."

What the sources leave open: Whether Čapek attended the premiere on 25 January 1921 or rehearsals at the theatre is not documented; the picture claims no particular day. The 1921 set and robot costumes were not consulted; both are typified in the picture, and the dummies replace the actors. The face follows an anonymous photograph of 1927, six years after the premiere.

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