“Edinburgh was an out-of-body experience,” says Hannah Reilly, writer-star of the festival’s big breakout play, Roleplay.
“It was strange to be looking at billboards of myself, because in the play the character comes around a corner and sees a sexy billboard of themselves. It was wild.”
Hannah Reilly
Monica Pronk Photography
Such meta moments are always going to occur when you nail the cultural zeitgeist — in this case, Reilly’s play about a struggling podcaster who reinvents herself as an OnlyFans-style “slutfluencer” and which tackles “the line between sexual liberation and self-abandonment”.
It’s being talked up as the next Fleabag (that show’s producer, Francesca Moody, came on board early) and after selling out in Edinburgh is opening this month at the Soho Theatre in London.
Reilly grew up between Sydney and a farm in semi-rural Australia. Her father was a comedy writer and her mother “a showgirl performer. I’m a split atom of them both.”
She started in radio, swiftly becoming a successful comedy writer and performer over there. But Roleplay is her first play (she says at Edinburgh, “I felt like Raygun at the Olympics… don’t use that as your headline”) and came from some direct experience.
“Learning to give people an uncomfortable experience rather than just make them laugh has been really interesting”
“I hosted a sex and relationships podcast in my early twenties, in my most chaotic era. Roleplay started as a sitcom and then became a stand-up show using a bunch of material from that time in my life. But then the zeitgeist made me want to take a darker and more realistic approach.”
In the play, her character Danni is broke and lured into joining a new streaming platform with the promise that, “if she can get 100,000 new followers and be this messy, unignorable voice for young women, they will offer her a life-changing deal. Despite being a vanilla, monogamous, romantic dork, she takes the bait and builds up this powerful new sexual persona. As she pursues content, she exploits people close to her and loses the thread of who she is. It has some bad consequences.”
You can see why this is going to be massive. The story is immediate and the themes resonant — “the experience of being a young woman now, constantly navigating the power and powerlessness” — while Reilly is a compelling star. “Learning to give people an uncomfortable experience rather than just make them laugh has been really interesting.”
But will it be the next Fleabag?
“I think there should be hefty fines for anyone who uses the phrase, ‘the next Fleabag’. Wait, you could combine the two for a headline: ‘Is this Raygun wannabe the next Fleabag?’”
So you’re not thinking about the Netflix deal?
“I would totally love it to be a TV series. But right now I’m just focusing on making a great play.”