RUR Themes

The dream of R.U.R is basically the dream of capitalism. If you build enough new, awesome, nifty stuff fast enough, everyone will be happy, no one will be poor, and there will be a great utopia wit...

In R.U.R., you wouldn't think gender would be a big theme in a play about robots. Robots don't have a gender, after all, right? Right—and that's exactly why gender is such a big deal. Here you ha...

As with gender, you wouldn't necessarily think that love would be a big theme in a play about robots—who can't love. Or can they? That's kind of the big question in R.U.R. Early on, Helena is hor...

Usually, death as a theme in a work of literature would involve, you know, someone dying—or maybe two someones. Or maybe it's a book about war and there are lots and lots of people dying all over...

In R.U.R., robots are sort of like machines, and they're sort of like workers or servants. But either way, they're power. If you control a lot of machines (or a lot of workers), you have more power...

Old Rossum, the dude who figured out how to make robots, was an atheist. He wanted to create human beings to prove that there was no God and man was an entirely material critter. R.U.R., though, ov...

R.U.R was written in 1920, not long after the Russian Communist revolution. Communism is committed to the idea that workers need to overthrow factory owners and take control of the government thems...

R.U.R. takes a rather dim view of technology and modernization. Technological progress is supposed to solve all of everyone's problems and end want and care. But instead, it destroys all human life...