Are You Watching – Royal Court

A ten-foot pool of blood spilling across a white-tiled floor is the final image in Georgie Dettmer’s professional playwriting debut at the Royal Court’s Jerwood Theatre Upstairs. In it, two teenage girls are playing: they are reimagining the end of Gisèle Pelicot’s story. In the girls’ fictionalised version of events, Pelicot gets her revenge by shooting and killing her husband. They find their catharsis and go to sleep covered in blood.

Are You Watching? follows a number of stories in vignettes, all of which have to do with voyeurism in some form. The stories look at sexual violence in the age of the Internet and AI — sometimes digital in origin, always physical and bodily in effect. A son finds deepfake porn, made using his own childhood pictures, on his father’s iPad; a famous actor’s leaked ‘intimate’ scenes are twisted into new horrors every day, culminating in a video where she is killed and resurrected to be killed again. Each points a finger at a new, dark, under-the-surface rape culture which lives on the internet, legitimises violence and provides a traceless path for any innocent viewer who happens to click play on account of a harmless (surely?) wish to explore their own sexuality.

For which parts of our sexual preferences do we take responsibility? Only liking women is fine; only liking thin women, less so; only liking women when they are drugged, tied up, imaginary, plastic, dead — that, hopefully, you can change. Are You Watching? points out that the complicity found in viewing these sorts of materials is not passive in the way it is often accepted to be, but actively paradigm-shifting. The voyeur has power; the subject is stripped of it. The subject exists; the voyeur does not, faceless and untraceable.

A mother loses her young daughter after school one day, calls the police and gets involved with a good-cop, bad-cop duo. Bad-cop is the PR guy, good-cop is the ‘families’ guy — neither is particularly warm. The bad-cop draws constant comparisons between the missing daughter and Madeleine McCann, quoting her ‘blue eyes and blonde hair’ as reasons to be hopeful that the public will get involved in the search. The girl is storified and caricatured. Her mother is stripped of agency and painted as a drunk. Strikingly unique in its subject matter among the other vignettes, it’s an interesting observation by Dettmer to tell a missing-child story, in which a girl is scrutinised and turned into a symbol, in the midst of an array of stories about porn.

Are You Watching? is a fiery production of an angry, honest and provocative script. Jess Edwards’ direction has an impressive fluidity that makes the show easy to watch even at its darkest moments — sixty-five minutes flew by.

Are You Watching? runs until 4th July at the Royal Court’s Jerwood Theatre Upstairs with tickets available at https://royalcourttheatre.com/events/are-you-watching/.

Reviewer: Holly Sewell

Reviewed: 5th June 2026

North West End UK Rating: