Timotheus: Or, The Future of the Theatre

The year is 2100. Theatre has become something unrecognizable: an intricate, psychologically sophisticated machine for manufacturing emotion. Bonamy Dobrée, writing in 1925, imagined a future where performances are meticulously engineered by "fairfussers" who understand exactly how to manipulate an audience's tears, laughter, and terror. In this dazzling speculative vision, we journey through theatres designed to purge, to provoke, to transfix, revealing a world where the line between art and emotional manipulation has dissolved entirely. What makes Timotheus remarkable is not merely its prescience about technology and performance, but its sharp-eyed critique of the tensions already visible in early 20th-century theatre. Dobrée uses his imagined future to interrogate who theatre serves, what it asks of its audience, and whether spectacle and substance can coexist. A fascinating period document that speaks uncomfortably to our own age of algorithmically-tuned entertainment.