Hair-Raising Satire

Capek in "R. U. R." Shows How Melodrama May Be Made an Effective Disguise for Intellectuality

HEYWOOD BROUN

NOBODY minds thinking if you call it something else. Even college examinations might be made fascinating by the use of a little ingenuity. Let President Lowell require an entrance fee of every student about to take a test, announcing at the same time that the pool goes to the man obtaining the highest mark, and you have at once a sweepstakes instead of an examination. Even the long shots would get a thrill out of it. Possibly the Dean of the College might stand outside the room and make book on the result. Given a Dean with enough knowledge of the laws of chance to insure a good percentage for the house and there need be no more drives to raise funds for the salaries of underpaid professors.

People go into a spelling bee because it is a game and others give the better part of their lives to the solution of difficult puzzles, on the consoling theory that there is nothing educational about it. Peter Finley Dunne was able to present sociological and political studies of the most profound sort without frightening away any readers merely because he was shrewd enough to throw them into Irish dialect.

Playwrights have been singularly slow to learn the trick. Again and again a dramatist has blundered forward with the announcement that he was about to present a play "which will make the public think" and the public has run for its life. Of all the moderns in the English theatre Shaw has been, perhaps, the only one to realize the fact that a dash of sarsaparilla will in no way affect the potency of any drug which he may be preparing for a sick world. Some of his most profound observations upon human life have been insinuated by means of farce. You Never Can Tell and Great Catherine seem to us to contain at least twice as much wisdom as all the so-called serious plays presented in New York in any given season.

The Art of Painless Propaganda

IT is pleasing then to find that Karel Capek, of Czecho-Slovakia, is adept in the art of making propaganda painless. Capek became disturbed at the manner in which machinery is oppressing man and so he decided to write a play about it. The conventional thing to do would have been to bring the hero forward in the big third act and have him make a long speech about the evils of machinery, beginning with the steamboat and working up to the telephone. Growing excited he might, perhaps, move too close to an electric fan and be decapitated which would point the moral and the tragedy of the piece. Capek has been much more adroit than that. He has managed to make his plea against machines in the form of allegory and, better than that, in terms of gripping melodrama. The third act of R. U. R. is just as exciting and terrifying as anything in The Bat. It races to one of the most awe inspiring curtains which our theatre has known. In other words Karel Capek has managed to do his thinking on the dead run. Most of the rest of us are willing to be intellectual under the same conditions. It provides a system under which cerebration is safe because we are moving along too rapidly for anybody to catch us at it.

Instead of machines Capek has filled his play with Robots. R. U. R. if written out in full would be Rossom's Universal Robots. But of course that doesn't make it particularly clear even yet. Well, then, a Robot is an artificial man. A company has been formed which is able to turn them out wholesale. They furnish the world with cheap and efficient labor and they have no souls or aspirations. The early models didn't even have feelings, but it was found necessary later to sensitize the products of the factory because otherwise the mechanical men ran into things which would cut, or burn, or in some way destroy their usefulness. Bit by bit the functions for which Robots were available became more numerous. All the hard work of the world was entrusted to them and presently they were used to fight the wars. We haven't a doubt that the team which represented the American League in the late baseball world's series was composed entirely of Robots.

When the Robots Revolted

THE manufacture of these creatures is carried on in a factory situated in a nameless and lonely island. To this island comes a young woman intent upon bringing about better treatment for the Robots. She had planned only a short visit but instead she married one of the members of the company and remained. Still she continued her crusade and induced one of the scientists in the plant to make the Robots a little more like men. She felt that this would create a better understanding. As a matter of fact it worked out in exactly opposite fashion. The more the Robots were humanized the more they hated their masters. Eventually they rose in revolt.

It is in the third act that we see the little group of human beings awaiting the rush of the Robots. The other men and women of the world have been killed by the machines. Here in one house is gathered all of life which remains. Outside the army of the Robots is marshalled. There are millions of them but for some unknown reason their charge is delayed. The period of suspense is undoubtedly a strain upon the characters in the play and it is likely not to spare the nerves of the audience either. Finally the horde begins its advance. We see the head of one Robot coming up over the balcony of the house. And then another. The horror of the situation is intensified by the fact that there has never been any variation in the faces of Robots. The company has standardized the product. One Robot looks exactly like another

Of course, this effect cannot be perfectly achieved on the stage. After all there is some slight variation among actors, but it is not great enough to disturb anybody much except those who sit in the front row or closer. Philip Moeller has succeeded admirably in producing the effect that millions are on the march even though not more than six or seven men actually invade the stage. All the men and women are killed by the Robots except one old builder. After the massacre the mechanical men suddenly realize that they have no way of establishing their rule upon the earth beyond their brief generation. Emotion and passion were left out in the manufacture of Robots. They will leave no descendants. Accordingly the old builder is assigned to discover the formula by which Robots were made. This secret has been destroyed. The task is beyond the capacity of the old man.

How Love Came to the Robots

UP to this point Capek has managed to drive fantasy and logic as if they were a team, but he suddenly remembers that his story has been rather grim and, for some reason, unknown to us, he decides that he must do something about it. One problem has been curiously neglected in his play. Upon numerous occasions somebody or other says that if something or other isn't done life will perish off the face of the earth. No character is assigned to the task of saying, "What of it?" We are not suggesting that it seems desirable to us personally that extinction should fall upon mankind. We feel tolerably cheerful and are perfectly content that there should be a few million more years and then a couple of rounds and a consolation pot before quitting time. But at least it is a debating point. Capek dodges it. He proceeds upon the theory that the undesirability of race suicide is axiomatic.

However, as we were saying, Capek comes to a sudden decision that he must get something pink for a final curtain. The old builder happens upon a Robot and a Robotess who seem to be interested in each other. When he suggests that he is about to use the young woman for vivisection in the interests of science the male Robot immediately offers himself in her place. Chivalry has been born into the world and the old Builder, whose mind has probably been softened by watching too many motion pictures, thinks that it is the essential element in biology. He hails the Robot and the Robotess as a new Adam and a new Eve and the play ends with the suggestion that life is going to go on as usual.

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All this is quite out of the spirit of the rest of the play. It is not only sweet but self-consciously sweet. The love scene between the Robot and the Robotess impairs an illusion. The carefully created feeling that these creatures are something less than human is damaged when we find two of them behaving exactly like a traditional theatre juvenile and a traditional flapper. Perhaps it is just as well that R. U. R. is not perfect for it is a play with elements of greatness and defects serve to throw into relief its magnificence, The piece is well played with Basil Sydney and John Rutherford conspicuous in the cast.

In general the month has marked the beginning of the salvation of the present season. Hauptmann's Rose Bernd does not interest us greatly, but it affords Ethel Barrymore an opportunity to give one of the best performances of her career, Then there is Loyalties, not quite the best of Galsworthy but good sound, finished and plausible Galsworthy. No other play in New York has the same persuasive reality. Several cuts below this is The Faithful Heart. We are entirely conscious of the fact that Monckton Hoffe's play is sentimental but it is shrewdly restrained and so beautifully acted by Flora Sheffield and Tom Nesbitt, that it rings with a tone which disarms. suspicion.