Kosar Ali in Are You Watching? [Madeleine Penfold]

IT must have been a dream come true for Georgie Dettmer when the Royal Court selected her debut play from its Open Submissions scheme to be part of its 70th anniversary season.

Are You Watching? is an unsettling look at porn, voyeurism, and the thin line between entertainment and exploitation.

Several familiar narratives are woven together at breakneck speed. Two girls (Kosar Ali and Abby McCann) on a sleepover try to unravel the meaning of a true story involving a husband who drugs his wife so other men can have sex with her, films them, and shares the footage online.

When a child goes missing, her mother (Lucy McCormick) has to face the media fallout and the judgement of both police and public. A journalist (Maimuna Memon) is paid to watch porn videos while her responses are monitored to determine her level of arousal.

A son (an impressive stage debut from Billy Bolt) confronts a father (Nicholas Rowe), who has been generating male porn using AI, while a film star has her online body “stolen” and finds herself powerless to stop the compromising images going viral.

Dettmer covers a lot in 65 minutes and might have benefited from developing some vignettes in more depth. But her point is the ubiquity of pornography, the never-ending stream of violence and voyeurism we are exposed to daily, and the ease with which the digital supplants reality.

Jess Edwards’s well-paced production features a terrific multi-rolling cast who transition seamlessly between scenes – their energy is infectious – and Dettmer proves an exciting new talent to watch.

Until July 4
royalcourttheatre.com/