ROLEPLAY - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026

​ROLEPLAY arrives with considerable anticipation. Already sold out before opening night, the show has made its intentions clear before we have even entered the theatre. Its poster, featuring Hannah Reilly's Dani stretched out in a deliberately suggestive pose, is almost an extension of the performance itself: a carefully constructed image designed to catch our attention and sell us something. With Francesca Moody, producer of Fleabag and Baby Reindeer, also attached as co-producer, there is an understandable sense of expectation. 

Written and performed by award-winning creative Hannah Reilly and directed by Paige Rattray, the show follows Dani, a broke feminist podcaster who reinvents herself as a provocative "slutfluencer" in pursuit of fame, money and visibility. What begins as a seemingly empowering rebrand gradually becomes something much more complicated as Dani finds herself increasingly lost inside the character she has created.

And really, the title tells us everything we need to know. ROLEPLAY is exactly what it says it is. Everyone is playing a role, and increasingly, nobody seems quite sure where the performance ends and the person begins.

Reilly gives a brilliant, high-energy performance, switching between characters, personas and versions of Dani with an impressive fluidity. But the real cleverness is in how the role-playing extends far beyond the theatrical device. Dani is constantly performing. She performs the sexually liberated woman. She performs the confident feminist. She performs the sexually satisfied lover, even when she is faking her orgasms. 

Her opening line perfectly establishes the rules of the game: "Some of this is true, some of it is not and the rest is none of your business." It is both a joke and a mission statement. In a world where everyone is encouraged to turn their identity into content, how much of what we see is ever actually real? The answer, ROLEPLAY suggests, is increasingly difficult to determine.

Dani's transformation into a "slutfluencer" initially appears to be an act of agency. She is reclaiming sexuality, feminism and the right to control her own image. But the performance soon exposes the contradiction at the heart of this kind of empowerment. If sexuality becomes content, and content becomes a product, how free are we when our livelihood depends on continuing to perform the version of ourselves that sells?

That question extends throughout the industry Dani enters. The people around her are performing too. Producers and collaborators become characters in their own carefully constructed dramas, looking for conflict, controversy and whatever might go viral. Authenticity itself becomes a commodity, something to be manufactured because genuine human experience is valuable only once it can be turned into engagement.

Even feminism becomes another role Dani can inhabit. She presents herself as someone spreading a message of sexual liberation and empowerment, but the show gradually exposes the uncomfortable gap between performing solidarity and actually practising it. Dani can talk about empowerment while overlooking people who genuinely need support. The feminist identity becomes another part of her brand, another costume that can be put on when it is useful.

ROLEPLAY is ultimately a simple idea executed with remarkable precision. In a culture obsessed with authenticity, we are all constantly performing, whether we realise it or not. The orgasm. The feminism. The confidence. The authenticity. The outrage. The personal brand. Everything becomes a role, carefully constructed for someone else's consumption. 

Lee Hutchison

4/5

Runs until August 31st at Summerhall