Writer: Georgie Dettmer
Director: Jess Edwards
Is this the world we live in? A world full of violent pornography and missing schoolchildren? A world full of explicit images, both real and generated by AI? Georgie Dettmer’s debut play, Are You Watching? playing upstairs at the Royal Court, suggests so, and there is not one sliver of hope for the future. Bold, discomforting, and unflinching, Are You Watching?, with its subject matter and short scenes, is a throwback to 1990s in-yer-face theatre.
Of course, a lot has changed since the last decade of the 20th century and no longer do teenage boys have to lift X-rated magazines from the top shelf at newsagents. In Dettmer’s play, alongside their bunkbed, two girls chat about the porn they’ve consumed online. One of them tells the other about how she has watched countless men rape a drugged wife while the husband films the attacks and uploads the footage onto the internet. The two girls obsess over the logistics.
On the other side of the traverse stage, made of tiles like a shower block, a female journalist signs up for an experiment to see how human bodies respond while watching porn. She appears to be more aroused when viewing violent porn, although she and the researchers can’t tell if the rape scenario she watches is staged or real.
More stories arrive, some no more than a single scene, others picked up later in the 65-minute running time. A 14-year-old girl goes missing; a son finds porn on his father’s iPad; and a famous female actor discovers that someone is creating AI films using her body and face with brutal storylines. In one of the videos, her assailants kill her, then bring her back to life so they can kill her again. Dettmer’s sledgehammer never stops for a second.
And perhaps it should rest more in places to allow for more conversations between the characters on whether the accessibility of porn online has redefined people’s sexual desires, and whether videos of sexual violence are reflecting society or creating it. Dettmer is interested in how things are at the moment in 2026, when the news is full of stories like the ones in her play, but she remains distant from any investigations into how to solve the issues of violence against women and children. For all its daring, Are You Watching? lacks anger as each vicious scene impassively follows the other.
In The Trial of Ubu by Simon Stephens, the most famous of the in-yer-face playwrights, a female interpreter, working at the trial of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu, appears to have some kind of emotional breakdown as she translates the dictator’s war crimes into English. However, in Are You Watching?, the responses of the two girls talking about porn hardly ever venture into incredulity or fear, suggesting that they are inured to what they see, unlike the translator in Stephens’s play.
It must be hard for the actors to play their broken characters, but they do well, especially Billy Bolt, who switches neatly between wily police comms manager, 18-year-old virgin and the boy who finds the unimaginable on his father’s computer. Playing the two girls who are on stage the entire time, Kosar Ali (who was so impressive in the film Rocks) and Abbie McCann bring innocent childhood to a world where innocence no longer appears to be a virtue. Lucy McCormick and Maimuna Memon are excellent in their many roles, changing swiftly from grieving mothers to cold clinicians. The underused Nicholas Rowe provides the shadow of power in his roles.
Georgia Wilmot’s shower block set holds a final gory surprise, but by this time, it seems superfluous to the bloodbath of stories already told.
Runs until 4 July 2025
