Tallinn City Theatre examines online radicalisation in Blue-eyed

Tallinn City Theatre’s documentary-based production Blue-eyed explores how online misogyny and the manosphere can radicalise boys, ERR reports in a review by Piret Tali. Written by Piret Jaaks and directed by Marta Aliide Jakovski, the play draws on interviews with teachers, youth workers and police officers. It premiered on April 11 in the theatre’s Black Hall.

Tali writes that her understanding of the issue changed while making a TV3 Laser programme in February 2023 about followers of misogynistic influencer Andrew Tate in Estonia. The programme’s promotional clip was viewed a quarter of a million times, but interviewees were difficult to find. Tali says many people had not yet grasped how online influencers and the manosphere could radicalise boys.

After the programme, she began hearing about boys who refused to go to school, focused obsessively on building muscle, dreamed of getting rich through cryptocurrency and treated women and girls as if their role were only to make sandwiches. Tali also describes young people insulting female teachers and asking how much they earn or where their Lamborghini is.

She says the online hostility exists alongside Nazi salutes and conspiracy theories built around the claim that “we’ve been lied to”. Tali also refers to a civic initiative called “Hunt paedophiles” and to brutal murders in Raasiku and Pärnu, in which girls were among the participants and men were killed. She asks whether that makes those involved victims of the manosphere.

Tali recalls presenting clips from the programme at a media day at her former school in 2023. The boys were enthusiastic, the girls expressed strong contempt, and teachers seemed unaware of the issue, she writes. She argues that educators and men are left on opposite sides of a wider conflict between the sexes, while online influencers urge boys to fight for what they are told is men’s lost place in society.

The review also discusses the 2025 Netflix series Adolescence, in which 13-year-old Jamie Miller is arrested on suspicion of murdering a classmate. The four-part series brought issues including incels and the “red pill” and “blue pill” into public view and became hugely popular, Tali writes.

Some interviews in Blue-eyed are performed verbatim by actors speaking into microphones. Tali says these documentary moments create distance from the story being told on stage and leave the production feeling somewhat incomplete.