Are you looking? review – an unflinching, rage-filled inquiry into the worst of the internet | Theater

GEorgie Dettmer’s look is simple. Nothing is locked away in Can You See?, its anger-filled questions about our twisted relationship to sex and violence, and the distance we hide from watching both of them on screen. This silly talk may feel a little out of place, but it’s also fearless.

Two teenage girls (Kosar Ali and Abby McCann) sit in bed, talking about the worst things they’ve ever seen. On the other side of the passage, the stories are broken into sharp, terrifying images, staring at each other as if they were reading on a phone. Directed by Jess Edwards, the depths of the internet are thrown onto the stage (with a host of dancers including Lucy McCormick and Maimuna Memon), as the two young women watch from the safety of their duvets.

Here are the bad habits of people – child abuse, emotional abuse, deep lies, corpses – and these are the ways in which these are captured and watched and exploited. It’s a clean idea and a brutal attack on how we consume what we consume, but the simple form holds little interest until each story reaches a sinister climax.

The end of each tale of voyeurism allows the game to produce more threats, jumping around instead of focusing on the worst. But the amount of stuff we carry in our pockets – and what we want people to see – is mind boggling. In several aspects, artificial intelligence is combined with AI. “It’s not you,” the agent tells the actor he represents after his portrait is stolen and weaponized. “Just screaming.”

Some of the imaginary stories are facts that we all know: a woman raped by several men, the rapes were filmed and shared on the Internet. The inclusion of Gisèle Pelicot’s worst-than-fantasy story is difficult and yet at the same time proves the whole story convincingly. You can feel it as the basis of Dettmer’s thoughts and the fuel of anger. Although it doesn’t know what to do with its anger, Are You Looking? it breaks down enough of any protective barriers to make us believe that we are not participants in what we see.