‘It’s not you! That’s just a screen,’ cries an unnamed agent, failing in his attempt to placate his superstar actress client, a sinister victim of deepfaked content and just one of many increasingly dark and disturbing narratives that are woven together in Georgie Dettmer’s provocative debut play.
Are You Watching?, a chilling 65-minute episodic play, centres not around characters but around the blurring of entertainment, arousal, and abuse, exploring the lines between consent and content in its targeting of sex and pornography. The material is stark, with episodes about deepfaked stars, AI child abuse, teenage abduction, and questionable role play all threaded together, bleakly, through the lenses of two teenage girls naively fascinated by the increasingly macabre content they are finding online.
Dettmer’s script is depressingly timely, using the real-life Gisèle Pelicot case as the catalyst for the girls’ discussions, in an awful reminder that the stories told in this piece, ones you would hope are not true, are devastatingly so.
Pulled together by Jess Edwards’s tight direction, the production, potent in its anger towards online violent and sexual abuse, particularly though not exclusively towards women, is brought to life by its six performers, who are tireless and unrelenting in bringing Dettmer’s confrontational tone to the fore.
Kosar Ali and Abby McCann are superb as the two girls who, at one end of the traverse stage, sit among their childhood bedrooms, still in the vibrancy of their teenage years despite the content they discuss. Their obsessions with sex, violence, and fantasy begin as morbid curiosities, the kind that focus on online urban myths. Yet, as the videos and images reflect upon becoming increasingly darker, the tone between the pair and the dawning of the realities of how such content was created becomes fiercely real. It is something intensified by Georgia Wilmot’s terrific design, which, in the play’s final moments, emphasises the sense of violent chaos that the girls’ teenage innocence is being destroyed by.
Lucy McCormick and Nicholas Rowe are intriguing and dark as the seemingly happily married couple in a plot which takes an awful, albeit slightly predictable, turn in the play’s closing scenes. McCormick is equally as deft in her portrayal as the deepfaked actress, as well as a mother desperate to find her missing daughter, in a fascinating subplot which interrogates the media’s perception of working-class women, especially mothers, which had more mileage in it than this short piece allows.
Maimuna Memon, meanwhile, is electric in her various roles, ranging from a sex positive girlfriend whose boundary-pushing present for her boyfriend evokes a sense of unease, through to her portrayal of a woman whose involvement in a sex science experiment provokes great rage in a subplot that is a less-than-subtle nod to the play’s message about what grabs attention online. Billy Bolt, meanwhile, is good fun as the awkward boyfriend and desperate son to an unimaginable father. Yet, it is his role as a virgin looking to commodify his first time that evokes thoughts about how sex and intimacy are viewed in 2026.
Despite its brevity, Are You Watching? is an engrossing and excruciating watch that, ironically, you cannot take your eyes off. In one scene, audiences are photographed by McCormick, inducing a sense of fear and dread that the characters both thrive from and despair about.
A tremendous debut.
