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: Word-Play

Conceived during a Royal Court writing fellowship in 2019, postponed from a planned run last year and now finally making it to the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs in 2023, it’s not hard to see where the inspiration for the inciting event in Rabiah Hussain’s Word-Play might have come from: The unseen politician who kicks off the story’s action isn’t named, but he’s a chaotic Prime Minister prone to gaffes; pretty much any words are liable to come out of his mouth at any time unless they include an apology. Some words have come out of his mouth at an 11am press conference: They include “can” and “seen,” and which way the emphasis falls on them could be spun to mean a variety of things, but like the politician’s name the whole sentence and what it means are never explicitly spoken in the play, most of which takes place over the next twelve hours following the incendiary gaffe.