It is hard to ignore the buzz around Roleplay, which is star-producer Francesca Moody’s latest fringe find (previous wins: Baby Reindeer and Fleabag) and has queues around the corner. An erotic dance intro fulfils the promise of its racy poster but does the production actually live up to its hype?
In the end, yes, even if at first it seems to be marketed on exactly the thing it seeks to critique. Australian writer-performer Hannah Reilly’s one-woman show features Danielle, or Danni, whose podcast (tagline: “hey slut”) is near-ambushed by a producer who promises her the world, if only she will sex up its content. She does so to become a “slutfluencer”, her product falling somewhere between sex-positive feminism and an OnlyFans page.
Danni is bold, brazen and ambitious. She boasts about being an attention-seeker – what’s wrong with that in a world of online attention-seeking? Her best friend thinks she is vanilla and her opening dance routine is just that – tame to the point of plastic and as unraunchy as an old-fashioned, airbrushed centrefold.
This is perhaps the point: Danni is a romantic at heart who finds casual sex deadening, even though her feminist forebears have won her the right to it – “my ancestors marched for this,” she reminds herself, ruefully. Her podcast begins as a serious feminist inquiry into young women’s explorations of sex but leads her to commodify herself for likes. Yet she twerks and finger-clicks on.
Danni is not the only live-wire here. Reilly juggles multiple voices, from her mother to a dungeon master to Danni’s various squeezes. Dynamically directed by Paige Rattray, some of it is too amped up, the voices getting slightly jumbled or lost. But Reilly is still a confident and deft performer, best at cockiness with a convincingly tough exterior, more at sea when her character’s vulnerability is exposed.
The branding of female sexual empowerment is problematised, from the way in which sex positivity is packaged online and sold to young women to all the ways in which men exploit or benefit from it. It sets this kind of empowerment up in opposition to Danni’s mother’s “boardroom” school of feminism that encourages entry into traditionally male public spaces. (Danni’s mother is a former foreign correspondent, traditionally one of the most prized roles on a newspaper, and in one pointed moment she tells her daughter that she has built her whole identity around male pleasure).
The story becomes darker, entering into the terrain of a psychological thriller perhaps too late, and only briefly, but it still chills. Ultimately, its ideas call sex positivity into question: is liberation to be found in the bedroom, it asks indirectly, or is everything that happens in the bedroom a mirror of the gender-power dynamics beyond it? Whatever the answer, Danni’s finale is bleak.
• At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 31 August. Then at Soho theatre, London, from 22 October until 21 November
• All our Edinburgh festival reviews
