Are You Watching? review – unflinching, fury-filled interrogation of the vile side of the web

A new play at the Royal Court interrogates the emotional distance audiences maintain when consuming violent and sexual content online, staging a rapid-fire sequence of internet horrors witnessed by two teenage girls [1]. Georgie Dettmer's "Are You Watching?" places actors Kosar Ali and Abby McCann on a bunk bed, from which they observe a cascade of disturbing scenes including child abuse, rape fantasies, deepfakes, and dead bodies [1]. Under Jess Edwards' direction, a multi-rolling cast featuring Lucy McCormick and Maimuna Memon hurls the internet's darkest corners across a traverse stage, mimicking the scroll of a phone screen [1]. The play's structure is deliberately choppy, offering little momentum until each vignette reaches its sinister climax [1]. The production draws a direct line to the real-world case of Gisèle Pelicot, a woman raped by multiple men who filmed and shared the assaults online [1]. Dettmer uses this case as both the foundation for her thesis and the fuel for her rage, grounding the fictional stories in documented reality [1]. In one scene, an actor is told by her agent after her image has been stolen and weaponized: "That's not you. That's just a scream" [1]. The play's examination of digital voyeurism arrives amid a broader cultural reckoning with online shaming and surveillance. Jon Ronson's book "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" documented how social media's grotesque, disproportionate judgments can destroy careers and peace of mind, with one subject describing that "the terror was always there" after her name became tethered online to a single ill-judged photograph [2]. Ronson found that the path of digital shaming is "strewn with ruined lives, suicides and suicidal thoughts" [2]. The horror genre has already begun mining this terrain. The 2014 film "Unfriended" turned a computer screen into a ghost story, where a dead classmate exacts vengeance on friends involved in her public shaming after a humiliating video was posted online [4]. The film exploited the inherent eeriness of digital defaults, transforming Facebook's "seen by" function and the blinking textbox cursor into instruments of dread [4]. A reviewer noted that "the disconnect between our online and offline lives" was made to look grotesque, as webcam views of paranormal torture were suddenly replaced by victims' cheerful Skype profile pictures [4]. Dettmer's play extends this interrogation beyond supernatural metaphor into blunt theatrical confrontation. The production refuses to let audiences maintain what the reviewer calls "whatever protective barrier lets us believe we're not active participants in what we watch" [1]. By focusing on content that is irrefutably terrible rather than morally grey areas, the play sacrifices some nuance but sharpens its attack on how content is consumed [1].