Are You Watching? at the Royal Court – review

Georgie Dettmer’s debut play is no traditional drama but rather a fragmented yet sustained howl of feminist outrage, and an attempt to make sense of things that are unfathomable and almost too much to bear. It looks, unflinchingly but with striking theatricality, at the murky world of online pornography. Jess Edwards’ intense, superbly acted production is a masterpiece of controlled chaos, balancing the artificial with raw anguish and gallows humour.

There’s no linear narrative: it’s a carousel of terse, brief scenes depicting situations that initially seem unrelated to each other but collectively paint a broad, grim canvas. A film star (Lucy McCormick, incendiary) is faced with “deep fake” images of herself in various stages of degradation, an impecunious journalist (an impressive Maimuna Menon) takes part in an experiment to determine how she physically reacts to pornographic material but doesn’t account for the emotional toll it takes upon her, a son (Billy Bolt) confronts his father (Nicholas Rowe) over images of child abuse, a child goes missing and her distraught mother (McCormick again) turns to the media for help…

Then there are the school-age children (played with appropriate gusto and wide-eyed  fervour by Kosar Ali and Abby McCann) obsessed with what seems to be the recent landmark Gisèle Pelicot case, although the names are never specified. In an especially harrowing design choice, the paraphernalia of innocent childhood – the soft drink bottles, the pastel pink bedding on their bunk beds – are in marked contrast to the horrors that they are watching online. They and their surroundings start out pristine but end up literally tainted by what they’ve witnessed.

In a Pirandellian twist, that same case is the basis for a movie McCormick’s Hollywood star is making. Meanwhile, a young couple (Menon and Bolt) film themselves enacting violent fantasies at home for erotic kicks (“tape it on here, keep it on the camera. No iCloud. No hackers”) and, bizarrely, this turns out to be easily the least disturbing strand of the play… at least what they’re up to is consensual and rooted in affection.

Personally, I was a little uneasy with the inclusion of real life stories (the disappearance of Madeleine McCann is also referenced) in such a provocative piece of writing, but Are You Watching? isn’t exploitative; it’s urgent, uncomfortable and, I suspect, painfully honest. We don’t see any actual porn (although be warned that Xana’s soundscape for the production is extremely explicit) but we get to observe the effect it has on the humans consuming it or victimised by it.

Georgia Wilmot’s set, a white tiled corridor running the length of the traverse playing space, initially seems clinical, like a hospital room, or an asylum. By play’s end it’s more akin to an abattoir, appropriate given that the most extreme and cruel limits of pornography are where compassion and basic human decency come to be slaughtered. Banks of harsh, unforgiving lights at either end, and a mirrored ceiling reiterate the question in the play’s title: somebody is always watching, and there is nowhere to hide.

Every actor, most of them playing multiple roles, is at the absolute top of their game, and Dettmer displays an unerring ear for dialogue and a fierce, bold theatrical imagination, fully matched here by cast and creatives. Are You Watching?, perhaps inevitably, offers no easy answers but probably a couple of sleepless nights. By the end of it I felt like I wanted to scrub myself with wire wool.

It’s frequently horrible, and it may turn out to be one of the most important plays of 2026.