Are You Watching? – an unflinching portrait of sex in the online age

Are you watching? Perhaps you’ll wish you weren’t. Georgie Dettmer’s unflinching debut makes for hard viewing: a doomscroll through sex in the online age – hardcore porn, deepfakes, voyeurism at its most perverted extreme – inducing both a howl of feminist rage and a stress headache. It is told in fragments, connected as if algorithmically, and runs at a short 65 minutes, which is plenty. By the final image – two young girls thoroughly sullied – we are grateful to get away from it, to switch off, which means the play either fails or succeeds on its terms. 

Are You Watching? arrives as part of the Royal Court’s Genesis Next Generation initiative, and indeed Dettmer speaks – in her fierce, tightly crafted dialogue – for the next generation of female voices who are trying to make sense of this grave new world. The fictions she writes engage with private realms of dark fantasy – hidden behind bedroom doors, on dim phone screens – and with real life: we learn that a husband and wife, first seen enjoying breakfast, are inspired by the Gisèle Pelicot case; elsewhere a mother is relentlessly ransacked for details about her missing daughter by a cynical detective. The girl has one dimple, she says. “That’s good,” he nods enthusiastically. “People can get sort of fixated on things like that. It’s like Madeleine [McCann]’s eye.”

Other episodes include a couple making a sex tape with a hammer (not a euphemism), a woman (an impressive, fervent Maimuna Memon) taking part in a grim research trial into female arousal that tests the boundaries of consent, and a Hollywood star who is the victim a Grok-style scandal, with nudified deepfakes bearing her face and body plastered across the website of a “tech entrepreneur and professional hater of women” (Lucy McCormick is note perfect in Valley Girl vocal fry and torment). Two friends in jammies (Kosar Ali and Abby McCann) share both a bunk bed and the contents of their dark web history: clips of slaughter and sexual abuse. One of the girls boasts of having seen videos of a wife, drugged at home by her husband and raped over years by scores of men. The girl’s terrifying, warped logic is that it is up to her to bear witness to the horror inflicted. 

Georgia Wilmot’s striking design, like the strong cast of six, adapts elegantly to the many roles thrown at it. The stage is a long pit, covered in white tiles like an empty swimming pool, or like a clinical hospital, and finally, when a puddle of blood seeps in, an abattoir. The two girls roll around on the floor: lambs to the slaughter. They are among the many victims of a play that is much too overstuffed with ideas but which, in its best moments, finds something resembling humanity in an online hellscape.

Are You Watching? is at the Royal Court theatre upstairs, London, until 4 July

Photograph by Madeleine Penfold