Black Mirror without the comfort of fiction
There is a camera on stage before the play begins mounted on a tripod at the far end of the traverse, angled at a bunk bed dressed in pastel sheets, doing nothing except looking.
Georgie Dettmer’s professional playwriting debut arrives at the Royal Court with the assurance of a writer several plays further into her career, structured as a mosaic of rapid-fire scenes that move between intersecting stories of online exploitation, deepfakes, image-based abuse, drug-facilitated rape, and the creeping horror of teenagers who have seen far too much far too young. Dettmer’s form is as deliberate as her content, and both arrive with the same urgency. This is Black Mirror, which is to say, like all good dystopias, not really fiction at all.
Jess Edwards’ production understands, above all, the importance of pace. The traverse space is lined with bathroom tiles, audience seated on either side – a rectangle that manages to feel simultaneously like a stage, a pool and a petri dish, depending on which moment you catch it in. Scenes arrive and disappear, each transition punctuated by a shutter click and a drop into near-darkness that keeps the audience permanently off-balance. Two teenage girls occupy a bunk bed at one end for almost the entire play, duvets pulled up, pastel pyjamas, the whole grammar of an innocent sleepover carefully intact, talking with the detached, almost competitive relish of children who have been given the internet and no accompanying instruction manual about the worst things they have ever seen. It is a precise portrait of desensitisation, between friends, in the dark and in the entirely ordinary way that it actually happens.
The cast are, without exception, extraordinary, and the production trusts them completely: a pair of sunglasses, a jacket, a small adjustment, and an entirely new person arrives. Billy Bolt, making his professional debut alongside his playwright, is a particular revelation. Chameleon-quick across ages, accents and moral positions, inhabiting a nervous American boy and a menacing man with equal conviction, moving between them with a fluency that makes the ease itself feel slightly alarming. Lucy McCormick carries the production’s emotional centre of gravity with characteristic precision; her arc across the evening, from detached study assistant to devastated mother, lands with force. Maimuna Memon brings a taut, grounded authority to roles that require the simultaneous inhabitation of perpetrator, investigator, and bystander, a structural demand the play makes of all its performers, and which all of them meet with apparent effortlessness. Abby McCann, as one of the two teenage girls anchoring the evening from their bunk bed, carries a pitch-perfect quality of innocence already corroded at its edges, the excitement of a child given too much access sitting uneasily alongside something darker and less nameable.
That the actors move so freely between victim and perpetrator, creator and consumer, is not incidental to the production’s argument: these are not fixed categories, the play insists, and the casting and doubling make that argument in the body before a single word of text arrives to explain it. It is worth noting Girl 1 was read from the script on the night by the playwright herself, following a cast injury, which produced one of the evening’s more striking accidental ironies, when the character observed that she could not possibly know what men say to each other in private. The writer, standing in, delivering her own line: the joke lands until upon reflection, it doesn’t.
XANA’s sound design is one of the production’s most significant achievements: shutter clicks, abrasive intrusions of noise, fragments of recorded intimacy that create a sustained, low-level atmosphere of surveillance, as though the audience itself is the subject of someone else’s study. Bethany Gupwell’s lighting holds the whole evening in an unease that sits somewhere between clinical and sinister, the LED rig overhead shifting to deep red in transitions that feel less like theatrical effect than like an accurate, depressing description of the ambient colour of contemporary life.
Dettmer is not interested in delivering a comfortable thesis or a legible moral. The play refuses to tell you what to think, preferring instead to place you inside a succession of situations and leave you to reckon with your own response. An analogue to the Gisèle Pelicot case gives the evening its moral backbone: a real atrocity metabolised into drama not for sensation, but to insist that the dystopia on stage is already the one outside. Are You Watching? asks its title question with genuine seriousness, and it does not permit you to answer without implicating yourself in the asking.
Are You Watching? runs until 4th July at Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, London.