Royal Court Theatre

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...

There is, of course, only one Archduke anyone has ever heard of, and that’s our boy Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Emipre whose assassination in 1914 was the spark that lit Europe and caused the carnage of the Great War. US playwright Rajiv Joseph – best known here for his plays Guards at the Taj and Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo – wrote his darkly comic drama about Ferdinand’s assassins a few years back, and now it makes its UK debut at the Royal Court as part of its 70th anniversary season. The fine cast of Chris Walley, Abraham Popoola, Stanley Morgan, Janice Connolly and Marc Wootton is directed by the great Lyndsey Turner, with design from the legendary Es Devlin.

There are lots of highlights to the Royal Court’s seventieth anniversary season. But where the Gary Oldman-starring production of Krapp’s Last Tape and the hit Broadway play John Proctor is the Villain would have been expected to come to London eventually, Man to Man is altogether more of a surprise. Manfred Karge’s hallucinatory solo play about a widow who assumes her late husband’s job and identity in inter-war Germany had its UK premiere at Edinburgh Traverse Theatre in 1987 before transferring to the Court the following year. Stephen Unwin’s production provided a breakthrough for an androgynous young actor named Tilda Swinton, starting her down the path to global cult fame.  Now, in a similar way to the Court’s 2025 revival of 4.48 Psychosis, the whole band is back together for a revival of Man to Man once again starring Swinton and directed by Unwin. Although Swinton has starred in the odd stage role in Europe since, she’s not performed in the UK for over three decades, and who knows if she’ll do so again.