“Are You Watching?” at Royal Court Upstairs
Maryam Philpott in West London
★★★☆☆
7 June 2026
There is an alarming passivity inherent in watching Georgie Dettmer’s debut play Are You Watching? at the Royal Court, and while that may be the purpose of this anthology of scenes about voyeurism, desire, sexual violence, and multiple forms of exploitation, it leaves the auditorium in a slightly static state. Taking lots of different angles on what it means to be sexualized, to watch, film, and participate in public sex acts (whether consensual or not), the breadth of perspectives in Dettmer’s play is perhaps far more interesting than the theatrical structure in which they co-exist – offering no commentary or emotional connection to draw the multiple strands together.
Are You Watching? is largely a collection of separate stories held together by a theme which Dettmer delivers as chapters across this 65-minute performance. Two teenage girls excitedly explore their sexuality through descriptions of the pornographic and violent videos they have seen; a father generates his own AI pornographic content; a young woman undergoes clinical experiments in “sex science” while being fed arousing content; a mother is pressed to make her missing child more physically appealing; and a movie star’s deep-faked image births hundreds of videos distributed by an untouchable porn site.
And Dettmer is interested in lots of different associated thoughts, telling these stories to make various points. She shows how few powers the police have to catch people who make and distribute such content, and none to prosecute host sites and audiences. We see the media’s obsession with missing children if they are pretty and blonde with the pressure on the mother to provide slightly younger images of the girl for maximum coverage. Are You Watching? also touches on the nature of victimhood, what it means to film acts of desire, and why sex often leads to increasingly violent behaviour, at least for the characters in this play.
Many of these are half-thoughts, ideas thrown up by the scenarios that Dettmer creates without necessarily drawing any conclusions about human nature, the over-sexualization of popular culture, unregulated pornography, or the role of the Internet in increasing the potential for all kinds of harm for men and women compromised by sexual content. Nor does the play really think about consent at a deeper level particularly where content is manipulated or entirely imagined yet provokes real physical responses in those that watch it. The fear of the teenage girls who thought they were telling stories but who feel violated and traumatized when they watch for real is particularly interesting, but the thought remains a conceptual one.
Performed by just six actors, this is a real ensemble piece with Kosar Ali and Abby McCann playing the teenagers who appropriately watch everyone else all the time, while Billy Bolt, Lucy McCormick, Maimuna Memon, and Nicholas Rowe play everyone else, moving swiftly between scenarios and personalities in Jess Edwards’s constantly moving production. Staged in traverse, scenes take place in Georgia Wilmot’s long basin-like design, a not quite pristine sink of humanity with a key purpose in the closing moments of the show as the wider implications of corruption and violence ooze through.
There is a lot of crossover here with Sophia Chetin-Leuner’s Porn Play staged at the Royal Court late last year, which also explored female desire and addiction while the seeking of increasingly extreme content had a self-destructive effect on the central character’s real life. Are You Watching? doesn’t offer up any thoughts about what it is showing you, only an endlessly grim view of human nature stripped of any agency, making the characters and the audience passive observers, happy to watch others perform for our gratification while doing nothing to stop it.
