ROLEPLAY

ROLEPLAY begins with Hannah Reilly stripping down to a thong and crawling across the stage to loud, aggressive EDM. “Attention is the new oil!” she declares. Danni hosts a lads podcast and, after three years, is ready to move on, until Playback comes calling with a lucrative contract. The catch? Receive 100,000 listeners a month on her current show. To hit that figure, Danni starts pushing harder into her sexual persona, until it starts spilling beyond the podcast itself. The latest Fringe offering from producer Francesca Moody, following Fleabag and Baby Reindeer, ROLEPLAY arrives with attention already in short supply before Danni starts chasing it.

Danni's transformation is more complicated than the image suggests. She was the quieter girl at school, bullied rather than noticed, and even the people who knew her then are surprised by the person she becomes. There is an odd gap between the girl described and the woman now performing herself for an audience, even if that gap isn’t quite as exposed as I’d have liked.

Voice effects and quick shifts in movement let Reilly jump between Danni and the people around her. Summerhall’s TechCube becomes a photo shoot, a club, a bedroom or a basement through snappy sound and light. An encounter with a dungeon-master turns into a conversation about his dead father; an old school bully becomes an unexpected friend. Reilly has a way of making each character interesting without much effort. Even the mysterious stalker has a presence, though there is rather less mystery to this character than Reilly might have hoped.

The show’s posters, liberally plastered around Edinburgh, show Reilly on all fours, crawling towards the camera. It is the image Danni spends the play becoming: sexualised, watched and packaged for attention. The production is examining that process while selling the same image back to us.

Renee, Danni’s old friend, offers an alternative version of adulthood. Her new baby and different priorities throw Danni’s increasingly hedonistic life into some relief, particularly as the sleep deprivation, bleeding gums and lost friendships begin to catch up with her. As Danni's control starts to slip, the sound and strobes become increasingly aggressive, at times swallowing the words. The production's polish starts to work against it.

ROLEPLAY is very slick. Reilly can create a whole cast around herself, and the show is remarkably good at manufacturing its own effects. But once it has exposed that machinery, I wanted more from it. It keeps returning to the tension between desire, performance and being consumed without quite finding a second gear.

ROLEPLAY by Francesca Moody Productions, Global Creatures. Credit Mihaela Bodlovic.