Theatre review: Are You Watching?

The Royal Court Upstairs seems to be making a new specialist subject out of hardcore prawn of the most disturbing and misogynistic kind, as six months after Prawn Play the venue takes another - different, angrier and more scattergun but no less memorable - stab at the genre in Georgie Dettmer's debut play Are You Watching Question Mark. Jess Edwards' production takes place on a tiled traverse set by Georgia Wilmot, at one end of which are bunk beds with colourful bedding. The childlike setting is at odds with the actual, unnamed teenage girls (Kosar Ali and Abby McCann) we meet there, whose sleepover chat revolves around one-upping each other in the most disturbing thing they've seen online. Inevitably this involves a lot of violent prawn, and the particular focus becomes a series of videos Ali's character has seen.

These are based on the notorious recent real-life case of a French woman drugged and assaulted by her husband and multiple strangers, but along with the horror the girl mixes in some glee at the grisly story this provides her to entertain her friend with.

We will eventually get to a twist in quite why she's so keen to share these videos with her friend, but in between these conversations the girls also serve as audience for the fragments performed by the rest of the cast: These include a Journalist (Maimuna Memon) taking part in a clinical trial about women's reactions to extreme prawn, that she will find to be more invasive than she expected, in more senses than one.

Memon also plays a woman who's convinced her boyfriend (Billy Bolt) to film them acting out an intruder fantasy that includes a real hammer; he seems to have put more thought into keeping the role-play safe than she has. Lucy McCormick plays the mother of a missing teenager whose police handlers (Memon and Bolt) seem more concerned with how to sell her daughter's image to the public than actually finding her; as well as a Hollywood star whose nudes have leaked and been used to create increasingly disturbing deepfake videos, and who can't seem to convince her agent (Nicholas Rowe) of quite how violated she feels by them.

And finally deepfakes appear in an even more disturbing context when a son (Bolt) finds out about the AI images his father (Rowe) has been creating on his laptop. With the exception of the story about the missing girl - which takes a turn into a very different area which I really thought could have been a play in its own right and I'd have liked to have seen explored more - these fragments work well on their own and as a loosely connected tapestry. If there's a running theme beyond sheer rage and frustration it's in how having this imagery so accessible can desensitise us not only to the violence itself, but also to the fact that those close to us might be much more deeply emotionally scarred than we first realise.

All the screens the characters look at are mercifully blank, although XANA's sound design is disturbing enough that the production's trigger warnings feel the need to assure us the soundtrack isn't real. As an exploration of the place violent fantasy has in the modern world and particularly for women Are You Watching? has a broad sweep - not all of it critical, as the thread of the young couple with the hammer, which is hinted to be connected to one of the horrific videos the journalist sees, actually ends up with a lovely time had by all, suggesting that there is a place for exploring this in a healthy way. It's certainly a blunt instrument of a first play but an often effective one.

Are You Watching? by Georgie Dettmer is booking until the 4th of July at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs (returns and day tickets only.)

Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Madeleine Penfold.