It’s about robots. That’s been the pre-production R.U.R. insight. The Robot Play. But take a closer look at the distinctive orange flyers decorating your faculty. That robotic face has been composed with human quirk; it looks like a figure from an Audrey Niffenegger graphic novel. This might be The Robot Play, but it isn’t robot theatre.

That R.U.R. is Rossum’s Universal Robots, the robot-fuelled factory that Helena Glory has married into. With doe-eyed naivety and the ignorance of many a sci-fi classic, she decides that they need a little freedom. The R.U.R Edward Kiely gives us is an exotic skeleton of Karel Capek’s 1921 script. Gone are the heavy dialogues and the elaborate staging. In are an animated chorus and a mischievous humour. 

At times it’s closer to modern dance than acting. With only four actresses stuck upon the stage for the play’s duration, Kiely avoids stagnation by constant motion.  The robotic movements reach synchrony eerily often, and in the opening summary of the robotic race’s history, a whole legacy is captured in movement. The quartet spring between roles as human leads to stoic robots with exhaustive precision, but it’s as the bashful chorus that they’re best.  They squirm with a strange childish anxiety as they narrate the robotic rebellion, half boundless enthusiasm, half squirming self-consciousness.  “So... that’s it”, one mutters, at the finale, as they form a terrifically uncertain Ta-Da! still. An ending that might have succumbed to the bleak retains its comic charm. 

With minimal dialogue, however, Kiely sacrifices much human emotion to directorial ingenuity.  He programmes his humans as emptily as the robots they dictate.  It’s a cutting commentary for the conclusion of robotic inheritance, but a little sympathy wouldn’t have gone amiss. When Emma (a great bundle of nerves elicited by Jessie Wyld) became the robot’s first victim, I admired the undertaking, but I hardly choked on my cider.

Wyld was the standout, juggling Emma’s dread with the slow domination of chief robot Radius.  What begins as a hollow monotone acquires slithers of resentment; Kiely might abandon tragedy, but he holds onto dread.  The stage is haunted by a subdued techno base which becomes ever more difficult to ignore, and having set alight the formula for a robot’s creation, Helena leaves a vibrant red powder to stain centre stage, a nice bloody touch on the black set.

So R.U.R. isn’t the most conventional of plays. It might, however, be the most unique show you’ll catch this season. Much longer than forty five minutes and the bare stage and ever-mobile cast could have proved a little too claustrophobic. As it is, you can be dissecting it in the bar by 11.45. ‘Challenging’ is a word made for government targets and ghastly schoolchildren.  We’ll go for slick, and clever, and entirely original.