'We wanted to flip audience expectations' - Hannah Reilly on her subversive feminist Fringe show Roleplay

The text is even more in-your-face. “Hey slut!” it bellows. “A broke feminist podcaster reinvents herself as a provocative slutfluencer in pursuit of fame, only to lose herself in the performance.” So far, so much like the flirtatious imagery of one of the hundreds of gauche student productions to appear at the Fringe over the years.

Yet dig deeper here, and there’s much more going on. Roleplay is appearing at Summerhall, a venue synonymous with complex and challenging work, and it’s being produced by Francesca Moody, whose name will forever be linked to the original Fringe productions of Fleabag and Baby Reindeer. Her co-producer is Global Creatures, whose hits include the stage musical versions of Moulin Rouge and Muriel’s Wedding.

Roleplay’s creator, writer and performer Hannah Reilly, meanwhile, is one of Australia’s most exciting young talents. Achieving early attention with the 2017 series Growing Up Gracefully, starring Reilly and her sister Eliza as two women following 1950s tips on femininity, her most significant credit has been the stage musical The Deb, a fish-out-of-water comedy about an outback debutantes’ ball (although the Rebel Wilson-directed film has been delayed due to legal issues).

“Yeah, the marketing of the show is a bit of a trap,” laughs Reilly about Roleplay, via Zoom from her home in London. “We wanted to flip audiences' expectations. They think they're going to arrive for a sexy fun time, but if you think it’s a sexy fun time by the end of the show you need to go straight to prison. I want to ask questions about where the line between sexual liberation and self-abandonment lies, and the way feminism has been commodified in terms of what an empowered woman looks like.”

Roleplay is about a struggling podcaster called Danni, who is presented with a Faustian bargain. “Danni’s podcast is a satirical feminist advice podcast, where she plays a character inspired by her best friend Rene, who is very confident and strong-willed and independent,” says Reilly. “Whereas Danni is a closeted, hopeless romantic and a bit of a dork. A big international streaming company stumbles across her podcast and presents her with an opportunity – if she sexes up the brand, really leans into that erotic capital, she can land a spot on their slate. Everything unravels from there.”

All of this, says Reilly, is drawn from her own experience. A decade ago she had a job (which, like Danni, she “stumbled into”) hosting a sex and relationships radio show with a major Australian broadcaster. “The brief was provocative, attention-grabbing, kind of ragebait before ragebait was a term,” she says. “And because I'm an A-type theatre kid who knows how to fulfil a brief, I was like, yeah, I can be this salacious, provocative person. I was in my early twenties, didn't really know who I was yet, and I found this persona leaked out into my personal life and had all these ripple effects.”

It’s a subject Reilly’s mulled over for a while now; not just the experience of transforming into this person professionally, but the effect on her as a young woman. She’s discussed it in a stand-up show, and originally wrote Roleplay as a TV sitcom pilot, “kind of like a high maintenance episode of The Week”. Yet external events caused her to view the story differently.

“Basically the combination of the second Trump presidency and the Gisèle Pelicot case clicked in my mind, and made me realise there was a much more interesting and terrifying story to be told. That was a really interesting challenge, coming from a strong comedy background. I wanted to try and push myself and scare myself into writing something that felt really truthful and honest in a way I hadn't before.”

This makes for, in Reilly’s own description, “a bit of a rollercoaster journey”. She’s a writer who’s known for smart, funny, accessible work, but Roleplay is a production which appears to dive right into the darkness inherent in how a woman might have to navigate the world. She seems happy, excited even, that it might inhabit both places at the same time.

“It feels like stand-up at the start, then pivots to a psychological thriller and plummets into a tragedy,” she says with a laugh, and maybe a hint of pride. “It's a tightrope walk tonally, which I love, it’s been a brilliant challenge as a writer. Danni is a fun mix, like Bridget Jones pretending to be Charli XCX, but she’s really Blanche DuBois.”

With #MeToo, much has (apparently) changed around attitudes to women and safety even in the decade since Reilly hosted her show. “I appreciated and learned a lot from that experience,” she reflects now. “However, when the idea of sexual liberation and empowerment for women is monetised by invisible larger forces, questions come up about who’s really in control. Like, I've asked myself questions around the different ways I maybe felt subliminally coerced to perform in a certain way.

“I guess that’s such an individual thing, right?” she continues. “We aren't offering specific answers, it's raising questions about how you untangle the inherent desire for something versus what you may be societally pushed into doing. I'm also really excited about the conversations between older generations of women and women now, about the ways we’re more liberated in so many ways, but how some things haven’t changed or have regressed, which is really disturbing.”

READ MORE: Can a play about a high school shooting be funny?

What does she want her audiences to take away from Roleplay? “Ultimately it ends on a little candle of hope, and holding onto that is really important,” says Reilly. “I wrote this play for young women, for the 23-year-old me, so I hope they go away feeling some form of hope for the future. And I guess I want them to leave with a robust sense of permission to ask themselves the questions they're afraid to ask.”

It’s very much a provocative show, then, but intellectually. “I was really scared about asking these kinds of questions, given how there's such a flattening of debate now,” says Reilly. “People seem to only be comfortable with existing in black and white terms, but so far the response has been incredible. I've been really heartened and encouraged by the ways people are engaging, because in this play everyone is wrong and everyone is right.

“My number one rule for creating anything, though, is that it may not be for you but you will not be bored!” she continues. “There's no bigger sin than leaving an audience bored, and it’s certainly not going to be guilty of that. This show’s like a freight train, and we’re genuinely excited for the conversations we hope it sparks.”

Roleplay, Summerhall, 5.50pm, until 31 August

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