Robot wars: 100 years on, it's time to reboot Karel Čapek's RUR

The play Rossum's Universal Robots clearly belongs to the 1920s but its satirical take on the meeting of humans and machines is all too relevant today

Not many plays introduce a new word to the language. One that did was Karel apek's RUR: Rossum's Universal Robots that had its premiere in Prague 100 years ago this month. Every time we use the word robot" to denote a humanoid machine, it derives from apek's play, which coined the term from the Czech robota" meaning forced labour. But a play that was hugely popular in its time - its Broadway premiere in 1922 had a cast that included Spencer Tracy and Pat O'Brien as robots - has now fallen into neglect. Given our fascination with artificial intelligence, it's high time we gave it another look.

But what kind of play is it exactly? A dystopian drama attacking science and technology? Up to a point, but it's much more than that. It starts almost as a Shavian comedy with a do-gooding visitor, Lady Helen Glory, turning up on an island where robots are manufactured out of synthetic matter. She is amazed to discover that a plausibly human secretary is a machine and is equally astonished when the factory's directors turn out to be flesh and blood creatures rather than robots. With time, the play gets darker as the robots prove to be stronger and more intelligent than their creators and eventually wipe out virtually all humankind. Only a single engineer survives who, a touch improbably, shows two robots transformed by love.