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

Teenage girls discuss the horrors they have seen via their phones as Georgie Dettmer’s reckoning with internet culture is brutally realised by director Jess Edwards

Georgie Dettmer’s gaze is unflinching. Nothing is held back in Are You Watching?, her fury-filled interrogation of our twisted relationship with sex and violence, and the emotional distance we hide behind when we watch them both through a screen. This bluntness can feel unsubtle, but it’s also admirably unafraid.

Two teenage girls (Kosar Ali and Abby McCann) perch on a bunk bed, talking about the worst things they’ve ever seen. Across the rest of the traverse stage, those stories are smashed into sharp, rapid-fire scenes, flicked between as if scrolled through on a phone. Under Jess Edwards’ direction, the depths of the internet are hurled across the stage (by an excellent multi-rolling cast including Lucy McCormick and Maimuna Memon), while the two girls watch from the safety of their duvets.

Here is a deluge of vile human behaviour– child abuse, rape fantasies, deepfakes, dead bodies – and here are the ways these have been filmed and watched and exploited. It’s a clean concept and an efficiently brutal attack on the way we consume content, but the choppy structure offers little momentum until each story surges to its predictably sinister climax.

The extremity of each tale of voyeurism robs the play of being able to cast a wider net of guilt, skipping over morally grey areas and focusing instead on what’s irrefutably terrible. But its clear-eyed stocktake of what we carry in our pockets – and what we demand of people to make others watch – is suitably disturbing. In several scenes, the inability to tell what’s real onscreen is compounded by AI. “That’s not you,” an agent says to the actor he represents after her image has been stolen and weaponised. “That’s just a scream.”

Among the imagined stories is a real one we all know: a woman raped by multiple men, with those rapes filmed and shared online. The inclusion of Gisèle Pelicot’s worse-than-fiction case feels deeply uncomfortable yet at the same time it grounds the rest of the story firmly in this grim reality. You can feel it as the basis for Dettmer’s thesis as well as the fuel for her rage. Though it never quite figures out what to do beyond its anger, Are You Watching? sufficiently shatters whatever protective barrier lets us believe we’re not active participants in what we watch.

• At Royal Court, London until 4 July