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.

Theatre review: Elephant

Another short writer-performer show premieres in the Bush's Studio space as Anoushka Lucas puts an Elephant in the room in a more literal way than it might first appear. Lucas plays Lylah, a young singer-songwriter who showed promise a few years ago, but whose career appears not to have taken off as well as hoped. Her story bounces around three periods, beginning with her childhood in the 1990s, growing up in a working-class London family with middle-class aspirations, who squeezed a piano into their small council flat to nurture her talent. Thanks to her French mother, she also manages to get a music scholarship to a French private school that will eventually help her get into Oxford. Her skin colour makes her an outsider and a target for bullies, but she succeeds in creating a more middle-class identity for herself even as her family move up in the world, buying and remodeling their flat.