Suzanne Harrington: Baby Reindeer made for explosive drama in a small London theatre

Richard Gadd as Donny Dunn with Jessica Gunning as Martha in Baby Reindeer. Photo: Ed Miller/Netflix

Top-notch theatre is a luxury, like fine dining or cashmere onesies. 

You pay the equivalent of a cheap package holiday to spend two hours wedged in a tiny 19th-century seat (a kind of Edwardian Ryanair experience) to see Gillian Anderson or Andrew Scott or Brian Cox doing their thing in London’s West End.

Unless you’re minted, high-end theatre remains a special treat. Regular non-millionaire theatregoers find smaller, more affordable places, where you don’t have to mortgage a kidney for a ticket, or book two years in advance. 

The productions tend to be rawer, more experimental, less slick, more challenging. Tiny audiences on benches around an open floor; small spaces transformed. You never know what’s coming.

In 2019, I randomly went to a new play in the basement of a small theatre in West London. 

It was a one-hander. A youngish guy with haunted eyes, describing how he’d been stalked, and sexually abused, by two different people. 

His stalker wasn’t there: she was represented by an empty bar stool. Her name was Martha. 

The guy who wrote and performed the play, someone called Richard Gadd, told the tiny audience how her nickname for him had been Baby Reindeer, as she bombarded him with unwanted messages. 

These messages were projected around the walls of the small theatre, her words scrolling endlessly. ‘Sent from my iPhone’. 

The room juddered with Gadd’s adrenaline, its audience mesmerised, horrified, our held breath punctuated with an occasional gasp of laughter. 

Afterwards, on the train home, I remember thinking about the blurred line between art, catharsis and nervous breakdown.

Now we all know that empty barstool. Personified by actress Jessica Gunning, 68.4m viewers have so far seen the Netflix version of Martha. 

Like mad origami, Gadd’s creation keeps unfolding. Real-life Martha turned up for an interview with Piers Morgan.

RL Martha also had reportedly bombarded prime-minister-in-waiting Keir Starmer (and others) with hundreds of abusive messages. 

A former bar worker from the Hawley Arms in Camden, where Gadd was a barman, told a paper of the culture of misogyny at the pub, contradicting Gadd’s initial declarations of empathy for his stalker. 

Stalking helplines have seen a 47% call increase from stalkees.

Speculation about the identity of ‘Darrien’, the man who sexually assaulted Gadd, is ongoing. RL Martha is suing everyone. Where does it stop? 

We should not know who RL Martha is. She should not have been findable by ‘internet sleuths’ – people desperate for a hobby. 

She may genuinely believe everything she says, may genuinely feel victimised, aggrieved, but people with poor mental health don’t exist for entertainment purposes.

Gadd did an astonishing thing by turning a private nightmare into a public performance, drawing upon that magical alchemy that creates art out of hell but at the expense of a vulnerable unstable individual whose identity was not protected.

The buck stops with Netflix, who gave us ‘Martha’ without sufficiently disguising RL Martha. Why? For bants?