Okay, theatre is all about acting, but then so is most porn. Except for amateur stuff. Sort of. And then there is AI, deep fakes and digital manipulation, while not forgetting real-world sexual violence and missing children. But even these things can be manipulated by those in power. And by the media. In her debut play, Are You Watching?, staged in the Royal Court’s studio space, Georgie Dettmer explores the relationships between the real and the fake, the watchers and the watched. And she does this by breaking down a dozen storylines into a series of fragments, intermittent short scenes, each of which ends on a filmic “cut”:
So we begin with a husband and wife having breakfast while blue tits sing in the garden. “Cut”.
In a clinic, a journalist agrees to be fitted with sensors, which record her body’s reactions to a variety of porn films. She’s getting paid to be part of the experiment. “Cut”.
A desperate mother, whose young teenage daughter has gone missing, interacts with a family liaison officer and police communications manager, who decide how to present the victim to the public gaze. “Cut”.
A film star discovers that deep-fake images of her, in various awful sexual and other situations, are being watched online, and there is nothing she, nor her agent, can do about it. “Cut”.
A porn content creator meets a young man who wants to have sex on film with her, but first she has to check his age and documentation about his sexual health. “Cut”.
A young woman persuades her boyfriend to make a sex tape, dressing up as a schoolgirl, while he puts on a more sinister costume. “Cut”.
A father, who has been thrown out of the house after his wife discovers AI-generated porn videos on his tablet, tries to explain things to his son. “Cut”.
A detective updates the mother about her missing daughter. “Cut”.
A film director interrupts a scene because the actor has moved off-script. “Cut”.
A police officer advises the star not to harass the tech entrepreneur who hosts the site where deep-fakes of her are streamed. “Cut”.
Perhaps the most compelling, and most warm-hearted, story is that of two girls, digital natives, who talk about disturbing material that one of them has seen online, and then react to it in ever more intense ways. What are they watching? “Cut”.
Lasting about 65 minutes, the 52 fragmentary scenes represent a recognisable online and offline world, where disturbing content – sometimes willingly generated, often unwillingly imposed – is available to view 24/7. At various moments, Dettmer’s play is excruciating to watch, with its instances of sexual violence and the impotence of its victims. The family stories are constantly distressing, especially as they show how few protections are available to anyone whose image has been abused – even the police, in their search for a missing teen, are shown to manipulate the girl’s image for maximum publicity. Men here are in a minority, and don’t come across very well.
Inspired by the playwright’s rage against sexual violence, the play’s central idea is that we are all, in one way or another, constantly watching images, sometimes out of curiosity for news, often as voyeurs of shocking material. And that part of being a watcher is the risk that our own lives, especially its more intimate aspects, will be also in turn be watched. Whether we like it or not. If the sense of powerlessness that these stories convey is palpable, it is also depressing – and at times very provocative, as evidenced by the idea, which also occurs in Katherine Angel’s Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, that some women are aroused by rape.
Are You Watching? is smartly written, with raw truthfulness, humorous flashes and distant echoes of the plays of Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp and Mark Ravenhill, but the overall form of the piece is that of a collage, stronger thematically than plot-wise, and sharpened by contemporary references to Gisèle Pelicot and Madeline McCann. If these little stories don’t say very much about complicity and control, or voyeurism and violence, then maybe that’s because there’s very little new to add to our existing sense of the dangers of a digital world that remains a virtual wild west.
Still, Jess Edwards’s production, which is designed in traverse by Georgia Wilmot, is well paced and absorbing, at one point finding a dirty visual metaphor for the vileness online, with the cast effectively conveying the human distress of the material. Most of the actors plays several roles, with standout moments which include Lucy McCormick’s devastated mother, Maimuna Memon’s horrified journalist, Nicholas Rowe’s abusive father and Billy Bolt’s upset son. By contrast, Abby McCann and Kosar Ali play only the two teenage girls in the storyline about online rapists, and they do so with a mix of convincing naivety, banter and eventually agency. Excellent. “Cut”.
