Where It All Goes Down
Someplace, some factory, the future
R.U.R. is set at some point in the near future (from 1920), in and around the factory of Rossum's Universal Robots. It's not exactly clear where this is; perhaps in Czechoslovakia, or a similar country. In any case, the vagueness of the setting is perhaps the point; this could be anywhere and nowhere, anytime and no time. The mundanity of many of the specific locations (Helen's drawing room, the factory office, a lab) makes the play seem realistic; the uncertainty of the setting (what drawing room is that? Where is the factory, anyway) makes the play seem like a fantasy. Science-fiction exists somewhere between that fantasy and that realism—it's a world that is like yours, but with just a change or two. The robots aren't real, but maybe they could be, somewhere close by, in a place not that different from this one.