Never have the words “sent from my iPhone” been so chilling. Baby Reindeer is an adaptation of Richard Gadd’s acclaimed one-man play, which hammered out the horrifying story of his experience of being stalked by a middle-aged woman named Martha, who he meets at the pub where he works. She gets hold of his email address, and starts to message him, incessantly, sometimes coherently, sometimes not, all through the night, every night. The emails end with, “sent from my iPhone”. In the show, Gadd’s alter ego, Donny Dunn, has a realisation: Martha doesn’t have an iPhone. At first, Baby Reindeer is chilling in small instances like this. But as Martha’s behaviour becomes more obsessive, and Donny’s more self-destructive, the two become locked in a terrible downward spiral. This is a self-loathing horror that is relentlessly bleak.
It is a true story, it tells us at the outset, very Netflixishly. Gadd first took Baby Reindeer to the Edinburgh fringe in 2019 as an hour-long play, crunching the story down into its harrowing essentials. Martha existed only as an empty bar-stool, and Gadd used multimedia and recordings of messages she had left him and people close to him, in order to flesh it out. I saw it that year, and was left stunned by the palpable fear it left in its wake. The ending was devastating. You can only pity the people who might have heard of Gadd as a standup and popped in to see if he was going to make them laugh.
