The male gaze is often talked of as a passive thing: a point of view, influencing the subconscious choices of film-makers, rather than an active agenda. Not so in I See You Watching. Here, the male view – in particular the male view of women – is insistent, demanding, explicit.
Playing a figure of authoritarian power, actor David Calvitto barks out commands: he wants his women to be pretty, demure, sluttish, compliant, hard-working, domestic, worldly, Madonna and whore. He could be running an audition with a keen eye for what the market demands or, more likely, he could be articulating base male desires.
And because he is patrolling the auditorium when he issues these instructions, he is on our side, physically if not politically. Objectified on the other side of the footlights is Kylie Westerbeck, playing a wannabe star in spangly majorette gear, clumsily tossing a baton and dancing with ugly enthusiasm. Calvitto wonders if she could be better.
Eager to please, ambitious to succeed, she does her best to obey his contradictory commands. She is fashioned in his image and has no resources to argue back. Conditioned from infancy, she has no thought for herself beyond the empty allure of Hollywood fame.
Devised by Westerbeck with director Melanie Stewart and writer John Clancy for Blind Faith Theatre, I See You Watching is an extended riff on a simple idea. The more relentlessly it delves, the more it outlines a spectrum of subjugation: at one end, a woman laughs politely at a man’s unfunny jokes; at the other, a child is farmed out to a pornographer.
The production makes its point but, for all the charisma of Westerbeck and Calvitto, it makes it bluntly, hammering home a message in a way that is uncomfortable and unnerving even if it should not come as too much of a surprise.
• At Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh, until 24 August
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