This deeply unsettling, nauseatingly intense debut play from Georgie Dettmer is 65 minutes and 52 scenes long, and I’m not sure I could take a whole lot more.
The vignette-based style of drama is a tricky thing to carry off, and it’s generally only later-career writers (your Caryl Churchills, your Tony Kushners) who have scored any meaningful success with the form. And it’s perhaps not apparent for the first third or so that Dettmer’s play will actually cohere. Its cluster of storylines about the intersection of web-age voyeurism, female sexuality and male violence are compelling but there’s a nagging worry that it’s going to be tricky to pay all this stuff off at the end.
And maybe Are You Watching? doesn’t quite tie everything up perfectly. But it does tie them up well. Moreover, it has an implacable momentum twinned with immaculately icy production from director Jess Edwards, in which every micro-scene is coldly delineated with the sound of a shutter, and in which the piteous cumulative impact of the horrors contained within outweighs the need for neat endings or a direct moral address.
Amidst a barrage of scenes that run the gamut from a Hollywood star aghast at deepfakes to a frustrated mother being schooled by the police on what sort of information she should put out about her missing daughter, there’s a central plot of sorts. It concerns the horrifying case of Gisele Pelicot, the French woman whose husband drugged her and, over several years, invited dozens of men to rape her while asleep, something he filmed and photographed – which is what eventually led to his discovery.
Mercifully, this isn’t recreated, but alluded to heavily by two recurrent schoolgirl characters who are having a sleepover and spend the duration of the play sharing tales of horrible things they’ve seen on the internet. The Pelicot case – not actually named as such – is repeatedly referenced; the girls are obsessed by it in an immature way, as an example of a Very Bad Thing that they relish in recounting the details of to each other like a horror story (which of course it is), although eventually the two of them go down very different paths with it.
Men, inevitably, don’t come across wonderfully in Are You Watching?, although in terms of the characters we see on stage (who are in the minority, with only two of the six actors being male) the men’s main problem tends towards lack of empathy rather than overtly bad behaviour. Naivety plays a part in it: the disgraced dad incapable of rationalising the AI porn he made; the nervous young man who has won a competition to sleep with a pornstar, who maternally tells him she won’t do it until he’s been tested.
The male characters feel peripheral, though: the heart of the play lies with what Dettmer paints as the ambiguous terrain of being a woman in the internet age. It’s a catalogue of moral grey areas: violent role play that turns out just fine; a woman who gets turned on by porn so horrifying it causes her to fly into a fury; the two girls’ very different reactions to videos of Pelicot’s rape. It doesn’t pontificate or spell out a judgement – instead it’s all the moral complexity of sexuality in the internet age, distilled into an hour and left to swill around. Dettemer isn’t saying ‘you are responsible’ or ‘this needs to be stopped’. She is saying ‘this is what life is now’.
It maybe gets a bit overegged at points. It suggests the Pelicot rape videos are freely available to view on the internet, which is horribly dystopian but I don’t think is true. I’m not sure Georgia Wilmot’s otherwise excellent swimming pool-style set really gains from the shallow puddle of blood that appears in it at the end.
But these are fairly trivial concerns for a terrific debut play, wonderfully directed, and with a great, hard-working cast. As disturbing an hour of theatre as you’ll see on the London stage.
