Review: Are You Watching?, Royal Court Theatre

Who do we owe niceness, pleasantries, kindness? Are You Watching? by Georgie Dettmer believes it owes the audience none of these and is all the more compelling for it. It is a difficult piece of work, resisting easy interpretation and lingering long after the lights come back up. It is not an enjoyable watch in any conventional sense, but its investigation of the nature of pleasure earns our attention.

At its core, director Jess Edwards interrogates how we consume violence, and more specifically, how we assign empathy. A true ensemble piece, the women at the centre of the narrative feel drawn from recognisable contemporary archetypes, echoes of online aesthetics and cultural stereotypes that might, at first glance, make them easy to dismiss. A star with a familiar accent to a controversial jeans advert, a grieving mother who capitulates to the far right, a streamer taking a barely legal boy’s virginity – who they represent in wider culture is easy to identify, and as a society we offer them little empathy.

Yet the play quietly unsettles this thought by being a complex meditation on ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ victims. These stereotypes, when placed opposite the horrific crimes done to Gisèle Pelicot, force the audience to reflect on injustice in a wider sense, and how we are all debased by sexual violence despite political lines in the sand. These are women shaped by grief, by radicalisation, by the pervasive influence of rape culture. They are not necessarily “likeable”, but the production asks a far more uncomfortable question: do they have to be to deserve sympathy?

Perhaps the production’s most striking idea is its suggestion that sexual violence holds a unique cultural power. Unlike other forms of brutality (war, murder, and disaster, which often prompt us to look away in avoidance), sexual violence is presented as something that entices as much as it repels. It is sensationalised, aestheticised, and disturbingly difficult to disengage from, particularly with fresh technological developments. The play blurs the line between performance and reality, arousal and horror, leaving the characters and the audience uncertain about what they are witnessing and why they actively choose to keep watching.

This theme of consumption is embedded in the core of the staging. From the outset, the unsettling sound design by XANA includes an abrasive, almost visceral chewing noise, creating the sense of being consumed by the world the play presents. The stage by Georgia Wilmot has seats on either side with a clinical, pool-like space as a runway down the centre, which becomes increasingly ominous as it fills with blood. A mirror hanging above the actors, reflecting the audience as well as the cast, and the bloody footprints reflected above blur the line between metaphor and a stain that can never be cleaned.Are You Watching? offers no easy resolution. Instead, it leaves its audience sitting with discomfort, questioning their own gaze and the systems that shape it. It is an ambitious and unsettling piece that demands reflection, even if what you find in the mirror is not something you want to see.

Cast: Kosar Ali, Billy Bolt, Abby McCann, Lucy McCormick, Maimuna Memon, Nicholas Rowe

Directed by Jess Edwards
Written by Georgie Dettmer
Lead Producer: Hannah Lyall
Executive Producer: Steven Atkinson
Design by Georgia Wilmot
Lighting Design by Bethany Gupwell
Composer & Sound Design by XANA
Intimacy Coordinator: Joana Nastari
Fight Director: Jonathan Holby
Assistant Director: Yanni Ng
Production Manager: Daniel Steward
Dramaturg: Gillian Greer

Are You Watching? plays at the Royal Court Theatre until Saturday 4 July