Review: Roleplay, Soho Theatre

Transferring in from a hit run in Edinburgh, the Australian show Roleplay tells the story of Danni (Hannah Reilly), who works to edit podcasts for men while running her own feminist podcast, Shenanigans, with the tagline ‘Hey Sluts!’ One day, she gets a call from a Murdoch-type figure offering her a path to success. Can she grow Shenanigans from an audience of around 200 to a podcast that will increase audience numbers by 100,000 a month? Well, Danni is going to give it a good old Aussie go. 

Figuring the way to do this is to lean heavily into the character that she has been playing, she starts rapidly pushing the boundaries of what she is willing to say and do in order to grow her audience. As her numbers climb, she starts to find herself squeezed between the feminist principles she wants to hold and the almost lads’ mag era idea that selling sex is the absolute key to success. How much of yourself would you sacrifice to achieve?

Reilly is a really charismatic performer, bringing an infectious energy, but at the same time showing us enough below the surface to recognise how much this is costing Danni – perhaps even when Danni can’t admit it. She’s also excellent at switching to different voices for other characters and bringing the laughs. She’s aided by some strong sound design from Lucy Baker-Swinburn, notably on an amusing dungeon master’s voice. In fact, the sound design was so good that at one point I turned around thinking a voice in the crowd was a real person behind me.

The key problem is that Reilly’s script, while raising interesting questions about online (and offline) misogyny and the commodification of sex, rarely digs below the surface. Characters and ideas feel like opportunities for making a point rather than people with arguments worth exploring. The satire can seem frustratingly shallow.

Having said that, this gets particularly fascinating later on when the play turns meta-theatrical, suggesting that its themes are less ripped from the headlines and more taken directly from Reilly’s life. It is a really intriguing shift that blurs the lines between performer and character and hints that the show is doing something much more personal than has been played out so far. I found this absolutely gripping and it was a shame that it didn’t get a little more time, perhaps at the expense of the wild stories in strip clubs. The real irony is how much more interesting the show becomes when it leans into the personal and away from broader points about society and misogyny. The blurring of Danni and Reilly raises intriguing questions on performance and authenticity – all tied together into turning yourself and your story into a product, a performance.

Roleplay is a frustrating mix of a hugely charismatic performance with a script that doesn’t quite do justice to its subject matter. There is a sharper, more personal show in here and when we glimpse it that is far more compelling. Still, there are a lot of good laughs and Reilly is an engaging performer, easily keeping attention throughout. 

Writer: Hannah Reilly
Director: Paige Rattray
Lighting Designer: Prema Mehta
Sound Designer: Lucy Baker-Swinburn
Set & Costume Designer: Dave Fleischer
Video Design: Nick Hillel & Adam Smith for Yeast Culture
Composer: Clemence Williams
Voice & Dialect Coach: Daniele Lydon
Choreographer: Betty Grumble

Roleplay plays at Soho Theatre until Saturday 21 November.