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n the evening of Saturday 8th November 2025, an e
xtraordinarily challenging doublebill of experimental performance-based theatre works will be presented by the National Theatre of the Czech Republic at the Helix Theatre, in Dublin City University’s Glasnevin campus. The two featured works will be Robot Radius and In Our Hands, each being just over one hour in duration. A visionary Czech production returns almost a century after its Dublin debut. WORDS Kieran Owens Most notable for their visually-arresting screen projections, this pairing of non-verbal mime, movement and dance-based works comes from the repertoire of the renowned Laterna Magika theatre in the Czech capital of Prague. Translated into English as The Magic Lantern, Laterna Magika is considered to be the world’s first multimedia theatre. Conceived of to be one of the elements of Czechoslovakia’s cultural programme at the Brussels Expo of 1958, it was launched officially as an independent company of the Czech National Theatre on the 9th of May 1959. Its permanent home is now at the New Stage of the National Theatre in Prague. Laterna Magika productions fuse film projection and dramatic acting with modern dance, ballet, mime, music and the Czech’s pioneering Black Light Theatre, the latter having been founded in 1961 by Jiří Srnec. Their productions are original and unique, and one of the company’s most regularly performed theatre pieces is Wonderful Circus, which premiered in 1977 and which has remained in the repertoire ever since. Rooted in the interaction between screened images and live action, the company’s creations have been regularly augmented with new technologies, now embracing digital projection and new media, including real-time programmable software. Both Robot Radius and In Our Hands address contemporary issues facing humankind, including the rise of AI and AGI technology, and confront the ideological dilemmas of scientific development that threaten the human race. They address the increasingly sophisticated and morally questionable developments in modern robotics engineering, as well as the challenges posed by the ever-increasing existential threats that arise from human-driven climate change and global biodiversity loss as a result of the degradation of flora and fauna habitats. Robot Radius Robot Radius is an experimental performance piece based on the science fiction play R.U.R. - Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti / Rossum’s Universal Robots, which was written by the Czech writer, playwright, critic and journalist Karel Čapek (1890-1938) when he was thirty years old. Čapek, a Catholic humanist, was born in Malé Svatoñovice, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now in the Czech Republic. At the age of fifteen he was expelled from school for founding an illegal students’ club, but went on to graduate 21