Review: Are You Watching? – Royal Court Theatre

Georgie Dettmer has looked at the internet and found it disgusting.

Fair enough: the internet is disgusting.

The question a playwright is then obliged to answer is: so what? Are You Watching? at the Royal Court, Dettmer’s professional debut, spends sixty-five minutes in the hellscape and neglects, on the way out, to file a report. So writes Franco Milazzo for theQR.co.uk…

The Shocking Premise and Structure of Are You Watching?

The content guidance alone is enough to raise both eyebrows and your heart rate before taking your seat: violent pornography, AI-generated sexual abuse imagery, deepfakes, and discussion of AI child sexual abuse material.

Georgia Wilmot’s clinical white-tiled set suggests a forensics lab, which is appropriate, since the play operates as a kind of evidence-gathering: here is a bunkbed where two teenage girls cheerfully debrief each other on the extremities of what they found online last night; here is a journalist with a clinical probe inserted into her vagina while researchers show her progressively worse material to measure her responses; here is a mother trying to convince a disinterested police officer that her daughter is missing. The Gisèle Pelicot case hovers over the whole enterprise like a bad smell that everyone in the room recognises and nobody quite wants to name.

This real-world horror is fractured across fifty-plus scenes, rapid-fire, connected by the electronic sound-design shock-blasts of XANA between each one (grating, misapplied, more likely to produce the desire to wear earplugs than to feel the pain of the characters).

Sophia Chetin-Leuner covered adjacent territory in Porn Play at this same theatre last year, with the notable advantage of a single protagonist to carry the moral weight: Ambika Mod’s Milton scholar and her violent pornography habit gave that play somewhere to stand. Dettmer’s mosaic evidences multi-faceted ambition within a sprawling architecture, and the wider the net she casts, the bigger the holes her good intentions slip through.

Exceptional Performances and Production Execution

The cast, however, has no such structural problems. Lucy McCormick, a performance artist who (when not working with the RSC) has a solo career built on the deliberate discomfort of the watching, flips between a distraught mother and an actor confronting the deepfake appropriation of her own body with the kind of technical ease that makes you feel she was genetically engineered for this particular play. Maimuna Memon is precise and quietly devastating as the journalist in the study, her face maintaining professional composure while the body absorbs what is being required of it. Two teenagers on a bunkbed complete the picture, offering the most authentically chilling material in the building, because Dettmer has not made them distressed. She has made them bored.

Jess Edwards directs with efficiency and the traverse staging makes voyeurs of us all, which is the point. Unfortunately, making voyeurs of the audience has by now become the theatrical equivalent of a restaurant describing its food as “locally sourced”: technically true, morally reassuring, and rarely as authentic as it sounds.

The finale gestures at Kubrick, deploys a thin red liquid that looks more Ribena than blood, and hopes that the association with A Clockwork Orange will do the argumentative work the play has declined to do for itself.

It won’t. Dettmer is a genuine talent and the anger that produced this play is the right anger at the right things. What the Court took a chance on here is the raw material of something better. One looks forward to the next attempt, when she will presumably have worked out what she wants us to do about any of it.

Featured Image: Lucy McCormick & MaimunaMemon – photo by Madeleine Penfold

Are You Watching? will play the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, Royal Court Theatre, London, until Saturday 4th July 2026. For tickets or more information, click here: https://royalcourttheatre.com/events/are-you-watching/