Roleplay at Soho Theatre: The ensluttification of feminism laid bare

A hit at the Edinburgh Festival, Hannah Reilly’s solo show about the ensluttification of feminism looks skimpy in the harsher light of London. Her sardonic, cavorting, firecracker performance doesn’t quite conceal the weakness in her writing and the nagging sense of improbability. Like the sexual encounters the protagonist has, it’s kind of fun while you’re there but it leaves you empty and self-questioning.

Reilly is Dani Moore, a Sydney-based, cusp-of-Millennial producer of man-chat podcasts whose own female-focused, sex positive show, Shenanigans, has little traction. But a junior Murdoch-ish mogul takes interest when she mentions that her regular hookup tried to choke her in bed.

If Dani raunches up her content and engorges her listening figures the nepo tycoon promises to make her rich. The idea of building a personal brand and working for exposure in the hope of future remuneration is, at least, true to the contemporary media landscape.

But in Dani’s case the exposure is literal. Soon, she’s on a massive billboard on all fours in her pants. The image is pretty darn close to the one used to promote Roleplay, and two moments of partial nudity further express the determination of the show – which depends on Reilly’s undeniable attractiveness – to have its cake and eat it. Is Dani fulfilling a male fantasy or owning her sexuality? The question is batted to and fro, eternally unanswerable.

Anyway, an attempt to dip a toe into BDSM with a diminutive dungeon master collapses when he starts crying. But a chat with an old school nemesis, now a sugar baby and OnlyFans creator, leads Dani to perform a ketamine-fuelled striptease that goes viral online: especially after she cuts it together with a disapproving voicemail from her mum, a former foreign correspondent, with whom Dani still lives.

Hannah Reilly in ROLEPLAY

Mihaela Bodlovic

From here, the show simultaneously lifts off into the realms of airy fantasy and descends into very familiar territory. A further viral moment takes Dani to the Sydney Opera House and an encounter with a baffled Cate Blanchett, even though her podcast apparently still consists only of vanilla, you-go-girl validations.

Meanwhile Dani herself, already anchorless and messy, descends into the kind of chaos that is the stock-in trade of contemporary one-woman shows. Her drama is measured not only against her alpha mum but also her best friend – a lawyer with a new baby - and a mysterious waif who stalks Dani like the spirit of the MeToo movement

At this point we should mention the F-word. Though all involved resist the tired comparison, Fleabag’s producer Francesca Moody is on board here. And like many shows in the wake of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s runaway hit, Roleplay seems to have been knowingly fashioned as an economical, brassy, achingly contemporary solo stage vehicle that could easily scale up for a streamer gagging for content.

Like Fleabag it’s often outrageously, confrontingly funny: I particularly enjoyed Reilly’s comparison of a certain sexual act with the assembling of a flat-pack double-bed, in terms of what’s permissible in a no-strings modern relationship. She has a bright, brash, tough-girl sassiness, talking about “hoe-manship” or producing “c**t-ent” with a mane-tossing, glittering grin. Under Paige Rattray’s (YES) direction she flits dynamically between voice-altering microphones, shimmying into and out of mostly clingy outfits.

But the commentary on the attention economy and the pitiless vice of expectation in which twentysomething women are squeezed today feels glib and glancing. An attempt to darken the mood from relentless flippancy into something more serious - echoing the storyline of a very different solo show, Prima Facie - doesn’t feel entirely earned.

It’s a shame because Reilly is an engaging and bold performer with a stand-up’s ability to work an audience. When it coalesces her writing has verve and raw wit. But too much here feels underdeveloped. Roleplay needs to tell us more and maybe show us a bit less.