Bought this to consider it for teaching, shelved it unread, picked it out more or less at random because the volume was easy to carry on a trip. One always likes to go back to the source, even if one doesn't actually believe in sources. There are robots. They are workers. They rebel against exploitation. They eventually reproduce humanity.

At least in this translation, it's a pretty unexciting play. It drips with misogyny towards its single female character (duplicated in the third act by a robot). Held up against, say, Lang's Metropolis (only 6 years later) it seems thin and timid, even if it does stage the utter annihilation of humanity. But even that was certainly already done to death (ha ha) by Wells. I don't know a thing about Czech literature or the Czech stage, though, so my judgments may be Anglocentric. Anyway I won't teach it in future.