'Are You Watching?' review — this scalding new play examines sex, violence and the online world

Read our review of Georgie Dettmer's debut Are You Watching?, now in performances at the Royal Court to 4 July.

Summary

• Georgie Dettmer's play Are You Watching? premieres at the Royal Court
• The piece examines desire and the online world
• The strong cast includes Maimuna Memon and Billy Bolt
• The fragmentary style is reminiscent of Caryl Churchill

Georgie Dettmer’s first play may prompt some to look away, notwithstanding the enticement to voyeurism – or, on a more fundamental level, the very reason for playgoing – promised in the title. Located within the grievous Venn diagram where sex, violence and cruelty overlap, Dettmer posits a world in which virtually anything is available for consumption, whether online or in real life, and no matter how grim.

The result makes for a swift, scalding 65 minutes, directed with characteristic precision by Jess Edwards (Elephant). Performed traverse-style with the audience seated both sides of a rectangular pool, the piece is acted by a finely tuned cast of six that mixes stage vets like 2025 Olivier Award winner Maimuna Memon with such gifted newcomers as Billy Bolt who, like his author, is here making his professional debut.

Told across 52 scenes, the fractured, fragmentary nature of Dettmer’s writing put me in mind of Caryl Churchill, and not only because the Royal Court playwriting legend, now 87, was seated to my left during the performance. Formally, Dettmer’s style owes a debt of sorts to Churchill’s quicksilver Love and Information, whilst the take-no-prisoners content is by this late date a given at this address: the trigger warnings seem almost superfluous. (Conversely, Walthamstow, of all place names, is deployed for comic relief.)

That said, not even Sophia Chetin-Leuner’s excellent Porn Play in this same space last autumn took quite so merciless a view of a world in which desire, however depraved, finds its often forbidding place. And so we get a collage of stories interwoven throughout that starts with a none-too-veiled reference to the Gisèle Pelicot rape case that shocked France and goes on to include various studies in arousal, be they real or virtual or displaced to the – safer, or is it? – realm of AI.

The proceedings are bookended by two schoolgirls (Kosar Ali and Abby McCann) sharing a sleepover whose conversation quickly travels to the shadier realms of experience. Clangorous scene changes come with bursts of light that plunge us further into darkness: we encounter a father (Nicholas Rowe, first rate) attempting to explain away an interest in child abuse, and a mother (Lucy McCormick) at her wit’s end over the loss of her child.

McCormick expertly doubles as a film star outraged at images of herself that have gone online (“I wanna kill the motherfucker with my bare hands”), whilst a young couple test how far they can push foreplay that is accompanied by a balaclava and a hammer and the intimation of brutality to come.

The visuals perhaps inevitably include the spillage of blood in time for the preteen girls to slosh around in it, and there will inevitably be those who feel the play is trafficking in the very outrage that it clearly exists to expose. I’d argue that Dettmer brings an on-the-nose sensibility to behaviour that is no less painful for being performative – as on occasion is the case here.

To co-opt the title, you watch because that’s what one does at a theatre, only for the play to end with an appeal for bedtime – “night night” are its closing words – that will haunt your dreams.

Are You Watching? is at the Royal Court to 4 July. Book Are You Watching? tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Are You Watching? (Photos by Madeleine Penfold)