Are you watching? Review – An unflinching, rage-filled interrogation of the vile side of the web | stage

gGeorgie Detmer’s gaze is unwavering. Nothing is held back in Are You Watching?, her rage-filled interrogation of our twisted relationship with sex and violence, and the emotional distance we hide behind when we watch them on screen. This honesty can seem inaccurate, but it’s also admirably unintimidating.

Two teenage girls (Kausar Ali and Abby McCann) sit on a bunk bed and talk about the worst things they’ve ever seen. Throughout the rest of the show, these stories are broken up in sharp, fast-paced scenes, passed between each other as if passed over a telephone. Under the direction of Jess Edwards, the depths of the internet are cast across the stage (by a stellar multi-part cast including Lucy McCormick and Maimouna Maimoon), as the two girls watch from the safety of their duvets.

Here is a deluge of vile human behavior – child abuse, rape fantasies, deepfakes, corpses – and here are the ways in which these behaviors have been filmed, witnessed and exploited. It’s a clean concept and a brutally effective attack on the way we consume content, but the choppy structure provides little momentum until each story reaches its predictably sinister climax.

The extremity of each story’s voyeurism deprives the play of the ability to cast a wider net of guilt, to jump over moral gray areas and focus instead on what is irrefutably terrible. But her blunt assessment of what we carry in our pockets – and what we ask people to make others watch – is suitably disturbing. In many scenes, the inability to tell what’s real on screen is exacerbated by the artificial intelligence. “That’s not you,” the agent says to his actress after her photo is stolen and turned into a weapon. “That’s just a cry.”

Among the fictionalized stories is a real story we all know: a woman was raped by several men, and the rapes were filmed and shared online. The inclusion of Giselle Bellico’s worse-than-fiction case feels extremely uncomfortable, but at the same time it anchors the rest of the story firmly in this dystopia. You can feel this as a foundation for Dettmer’s thesis as well as fuel for her anger. Although he never knows what to do after his anger, are you watching? It sufficiently breaks down any protective barrier that makes us believe that we are not active participants in what we are watching.