Karel Čapek’s 1920s Czech play Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti, or Rossum’s Universal Robots, has the unique distinction of being the piece of literature from which we derive the term 'robot'. The piece is a scathingly witty disassembly of interwar industrial mechanisation, a challenge to slavery and a satire of Eastern European work practice. But it’s also a play that has a difficult line to straddle tonally, swinging wildly from farce to wit to horror.
The Meadows School makes a solid fist of it. Leaning hard into the slightly fantastical silliness of the play, as Helena Glory (Gabriella Plaster), the daughter of an unspecified nation’s President, visits the Rossum factory and is immediately fawned upon by its Director, Harry Domin (Resa Nauman), as well as by the various other amorous managerial staff. Through this, we learn the secrets of the Robot creation and, as the play continues, the spiralling path through which Humanity’s hubris brings its own downfall.
It’s a lively, energetic and funny play served especially well by Nauman and Plaster, who take the brunt of the play’s dialogue and never let up throughout the heightened air of theatrical silliness as events increasingly grow more and more demented.
There’s often the issue with a play performed by teens and children that the acting may not fully live up to the material, and there are a few moments where it’s clear some performers are reciting their lines but either don’t fully grasp the meaning of the words or don’t imbue them with enough expressed complex emotion to sell the feelings. But this is a young company, and one which has brought a tough play to bear with much charm and vivacity, showing that a hundred years on, there is still as much wisdom in it today as the day it was penned.