At the Schwarzman Centre in Oxford, Headlong’s and the Schwarzman Centre’s co-production of Ella Road’s adaptation of Karel Čapek’s 1920 play RUR: Rossum’s Universal Robots turns a sci-fi classic into a story about who gets to control bodies, labour and consciousness. The production runs until 18 July. That’s the hard fact. The rest is the familiar theatre of power: a company boss, a private island headquarters, an activist forced into guerrilla protest, and a machine-made replica of a woman entering the scene like a corporate solution to a human problem.
The Company, the Island, the Boss
The play is set in the operations office for the company RUR, which creates humanoids by mixing human flesh and blood with code and data at its headquarters on an island. Loren Elstein’s design gives it lush foliage and scaffold, a neat visual for a system that grows its own enclosure while pretending to be innovation. Dom, played by Trevor Fox, is the company’s boss. He’s involved in a Secretary-style, S&M romance with his robot personal assistant, Sulla, played by Tiffany Gray. The setup is absurd, but the hierarchy isn’t. One person owns the operation. One machine serves it. The island keeps the whole arrangement sealed off from the rest of the world.
Helen, played by Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ́, enters that sealed system as an activist and the prime minister’s daughter. She infiltrates the island in a guerrilla protest because she believes robots are sentient beings whose human rights need to be protected. That’s the production’s sharpest political move. It puts protest outside the gates of a private technological order and makes the language of rights collide with the machinery that produces the beings in question. The company’s response is to create a replica version of Helen, played by Umi Myers. When power can’t absorb dissent, it copies it.
Rights, Replicas and Rebellion
The review says the story includes philosophical discussions about science, reproduction and humanness, but the first half is static and turns every scenario into an ethical or ontological debate. That fits the shape of a lot of institutional theatre and a lot of institutional politics too: endless discussion, very little movement, and a system that keeps running while everyone argues about definitions. The production’s pace picks up in the second half, with sharp, unexpected turns. By then, the machinery has already done its work.
The review also says the humour is modern, calling Helen a “Marxist Trustafarian,” and describes Sulla’s glitching and rebellion as an eye-popping comic highlight. The line lands because it cuts through the solemnity that usually surrounds talk of intelligence, consciousness and control. A robot assistant glitches. The boss’s private world starts to wobble. The activist gets mocked, then mirrored. The whole arrangement begins to look less like progress than a very expensive way of reproducing domination in a new form.
Ali, played by Irfan Shamji, is one of the few people on the island, and he later embarks on a romance with the replica Helen. That detail matters because it shows how the production keeps returning to the same question: what happens when a system manufactures substitutes and then asks everyone to treat them as real? The answer, in this version, is not comfort. It’s a picaresque robot apocalypse, as the review puts it, no less a warning for its laughter, but a little too cartoonish to be truly chilling.
The Schwarzman Centre’s production doesn’t offer a clean escape from the logic it stages. It shows a company making humanoids, a boss enjoying the arrangement, an activist breaking in, and a replica stepping into the breach. The island stays an island. The office stays an office. And the people at the bottom, whether flesh or code, are still being managed by those who built the system in the first place.