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The Edinburgh Festival is a unusual place. It is a place the place you can be weeping over dramatic ineptitude at one efficiency and crying tears of emotional resonance on the subsequent. A spot the place you’re as more likely to chuckle out of embarrassed bemusement as you’re to let rip a hearty, stomach chortle. In quick, a number of the exhibits placed on through the Fringe are good – and a few are absolute crap. So, when one will get a switch to the West End, albeit curtailed by Covid, adopted by a Netflix adaptation, it’s special. Such is the case for Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer.
Donny (Gadd) is a reasonably profitable bartender and a reasonably unsuccessful comic. One night time, a girl walks into his pub in Camden weeping and Donny provides her a cup of tea, on the home. So begins the story of Donny and his stalker, Martha (Jessica Gunning). “You’re utterly mad, aren’t you?” he tells her, affectionately. But it quickly turns into obvious that Martha’s insanity is not solely benign. Flurries of eccentric, usually specific, emails are adopted by extra aggressive, intrusive invasions into Donny’s personal life. What begins with a cup of tea ends in a multi-year marketing campaign of harassment that drives Donny to the brink.
Funny stuff, eh? But Baby Reindeer, regardless of its origins on the earth of stand-up comedy and its itemizing on Netflix as “offbeat”, is no mere quirky take a look at London’s comedy scene. Instead, it is a descent into the blackness of abuse and the residues of trauma. “If you aren’t living a life worth living,” Donny asks himself, “can someone ruin it at all?” For Gadd, who has tailored his present for the display and forged himself within the lead, it is a deeply private story – and a true one. A stalker, very like Martha, despatched Gadd 41,000 emails over the course of three years. Let me do the maths for you: that’s 37 emails a day (a tempo that even Groupon can’t sustain with).
Baby Reindeer is a visceral testimony to the psychological torment that Gadd skilled. Dealing with the arrival of Martha in his life forces Donny to confront each a sexual assault that had occurred on the comedy circuit and broader questions about his sexuality and place on the earth. “We’re all varying degrees of weird, aren’t we?” Teri (Nava Mau), a girl he’s courting observes. “Pretending to be human.” This is the query that vexes each Donny and the viewers. Is he a good man, providing a cup of tea to a stranger in want, or a self-involved consumer, liar, and manipulator? The solutions don’t appear clear. Gunning’s efficiency as Martha provides one other layer of ambiguity: at instances she is vicious, at instances she is weak, however she’s all the time a compelling presence in his life and on display.
The present is nearly over-stuffed with concepts. Among probably the most attention-grabbing is his relationship with Teri, a trans girl, the place he experiences disgrace that leads to him mendacity to her about his title and job, and solely taking her to tucked-away lodge bars. Dealing with the complexity of those emotions is the type of premise that could possibly be a complete present in its personal proper, as is the generational influence of sexual abuse (Gadd/Donny’s household are Scottish Catholics). But Baby Reindeer’s most creatively central query is certainly one of co-dependency. Does Donny enable Martha’s obsession to fester out of a want to be somebody? “I had a convicted stalker stalking me,” he repeats, mantra-like, after discovering Martha has been beforehand jailed for stalking. “Me,” he stresses.
In an interview I occurred to see, performed forward of Baby Reindeer’s stage switch to London, Gadd noticed that “it’s a show I find very hard to do”. “But it’s going to the West End and I couldn’t be happier,” he added. This is the strain. At Donny’s early gigs, the place he is routinely bombing, Martha laughs like a drain and all of a sudden the group is with him. Now this story – the years of intimidation – has supplied Gadd a seven-part sequence on Netflix. In his desperation to not stand nonetheless and fall behind, did he encourage Martha?
Far from being a level of ignorance, this is something Baby Reindeer displays upon. Donny is fragile and never solely likeable, whereas the writing largely eschews laughs in favour of beats that oscillate between psychological thriller and kitchen-sink drama. But even when Martha calls him “baby reindeer” and acts like he is a wide-eyed naïf within the huge metropolis, neither Donny nor his creator is fairly so harmless. This is twisty, mature, self-interrogating stuff that can go away you extra troubled than tickled.
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