Theatre review: Baby Reindeer

Actor/writer/comedian Richard Gadd won the Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2016 for a show that definitely doesn’t sound like the usual fare for stand-up: A confessional about being groomed and raped while he was a drama student, and the subsequent feelings of self-loathing that came from questioning his masculinity and sexuality. It was cathartic for him but all the time he was performing that show he was in the middle of another traumatic experience, as he’d been targeted by a prolific stalker. Baby Reindeer tells that chapter in his life, moving on from comedy and presenting it as more of a traditional dramatic monologue; in part as a straightforward development of Gadd’s writing and performing style, in part because he sees this particular tormentor as more of an ambiguous figure and a victim of the system in her own right, and doesn’t think it’s appropriate to use her for out-and-out comedy.

Gadd was working as a barman when he felt sorry for a lonely-looking middle-aged woman at the bar who claimed not to be able to afford a drink, and let her have a cup of tea on the house.

Martha, as she’s called here (the story is apparently almost completely true but with a few embellishments,) kept coming back, with Gadd flirting in what he thought was a friendly way towards a customer, and the other barmen joking that she was his older girlfriend, but it turns out she was taking everything much more literally and seriously. Being an aspiring performer – and presumably at that point without an agent - meant Gadd had a lot of his contact details available in public in case someone wanted to book him, and Martha soon had his email address, sending the first of what would be 41,000 emails over three years; a couple of careless tweets later and she has his address and phone number, filling his voicemail with hours of messages a week.

Jon Brittain’s production plays out in the round, with Gadd surrounded not just by the audience but, on the screens of Cecilia Carey’s set, projections of the texts, tweets and emails from Martha, that started by targeting only Gadd himself but eventually spread out to include his partner and family. Baby Reindeer (named after Martha’s nickname for him) is pretty damning on the current laws on stalking and the police’s ability to deal with them: The stalker’s messages are frightening but just within the law for the most part, a woman stalking a man is taken less seriously than the other way around, and the fact that he didn’t take her seriously at first and played along gives her a plausible deniability that at times makes it look like he’s the one who’ll be getting into trouble. The in-the-round staging means you get to see the audience’s reaction when it’s revealed it took three years from first seeking a restraining order for it to be granted (Martha eventually slipped up and left a message that could, within the current law, be interpreted as overtly threatening,) even after it was revealed she had prior convictions for the same thing.

But the show is also highly self-critical; I haven’t seen his earlier show dealing with his abuse, but that trauma does hang over this story as well, with the way Gadd’s self-worth has been knocked influencing a lot of his actions. He blames himself for mishandling the situation and feels guilty over the fact that Martha clearly has mental illnesses that are going untreated. There’s also a strange kind of co-dependency in the relationship: For most of this period Gadd was dating a transgender woman, and though increasingly able to be open about it with his loved ones, his ongoing issues with his masculinity and sexuality made him uncomfortable to come out about the relationship in his professional life; having a potentially dangerous stalker gave him an excuse to keep his partner out of the spotlight. The story is an open-ended one – the restraining order doesn’t stop Martha from contacting his parents or abusing his former workplace, and at the back of his mind he believes she might be in the audience one night – and the show similarly doesn’t come to any easy conclusions. It’s a frightening story, not just because of how easy it makes it seem to have someone intrude on your life and how hard it is to stop it, but also because it shows the experience as capable of eroding your sense of who you are.

Baby Reindeer by Richard Gadd is booking until the 9th of November at the Bush’s Holloway Theatre*.

Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Andrew Perry.

*I don’t know when the main house at the Bush got renamed the Holloway Theatre, and can’t find anything about it on the website; so I’m going to assume it was, quite rightly, named in memory of Loleatta.