#BabyReindeer Archives - Carl Woodward

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Baby Reindeer will play a strictly limited season at the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End

Following award-winning, sell out runs at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the Bush Theatre, Richard Gadd’s Tour De Force one-man show will play a strictly limited season at The Ambassadors Theatre in the West End
A harrowing story of how one act of kindness plunged Richard Gadd into six years of relentless stalking and harassment
Tickets go on sale for the production today with over 500 tickets per week priced at £25 or less

“I did question whether I deserved it. Where did my wrongdoing stop and hers begin?”

When award-winning comedian Richard Gadd offers a stranger a free cup of tea, he has no sense of the nightmare to come. One act of kindness. Six years of torment.

The sell-out smash hit of last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, Baby Reindeer is the “blistering” debut play (The Daily Telegraph) from Richard Gadd (Monkey See Monkey Do, Netflix’s Sex Education). Directed by Olivier Award-winner Jon Brittain (Rotterdam), this is a chilling personal account of compulsion, delusion and obsession. Some admirers simply won’t be shaken off. “A haunted, haunting hour.” (The Guardian).

Baby Reindeer will play a strictly limited London run at the Ambassadors Theatre ahead of a New York transfer to BAM in May 2020.

Richard Gadd said: “Baby Reindeer has been one of the most challenging, yet rewarding experiences of my life. With an incredible team behind me, I have pushed myself to ridiculous limits in a show I find incredibly hard to say and do. The show is about the past six years of my life. An incredibly complicated, messy, confusing, and ultimately challenging period of time at the hands of a serial stalker hell-bent on ruining my life. It is a period of my life that I still look back on to this day with much unease. How did it get as bad as it did? How was it allowed to go on for so long? Why was there no help for me? I feel a moral duty to let people know the terrifying reality of going through something like this. I am absolutely delighted to be in the West End at such a prestigious venue like the Ambassadors. It is all a dream come true.”

Francesca Moody said: “It has been truly incredible to watch the success of Richard’s remarkable theatrical debut in Edinburgh and then at the Bush Theatre. Baby Reindeer is one of the most original and brilliant pieces of theatre I have ever seen and I passionately believe that it should be experienced by as many people as possible. I am thrilled to be partnering with Sonia Friedman Productions to bring Baby Reindeer to the West-End and a wider audience.”

Sonia Friedman said: “In the early 2000s, I produced, programmed and oversaw dozens of productions at the Ambassadors Theatre. It occupies a special place in my heart as the venue where I learned to push the boundaries of what is possible in commercial theatre. SFP is thrilled to be returning with this extraordinary play featuring a truly break-out performance from Richard Gadd. Baby Reindeer is the first of several remarkable works my creative development team and I have sought out to bring to this beautiful and intimate venue. We are excited to present this original, vital, small-scale work which demands to be seen by a wider audience in London’s West End.”

***** ‘A haunting, unsettling monologue about the nature of obsession’ – Evening Standard

**** ‘…tightens its grip with terrible inexorability’ – The Guardian

***** ‘A majestic performance – a reckoning, an exorcism’ – The Stage

**** ‘A master narrator full of intelligent insight and sheer descriptive power.’ – The Scotsman

**** ‘Utterly compelling’ – WhatsOnStage.com

**** ‘Baby Reindeer will follow you all the way home.’ – Financial Times

WINNER Fringe First 2019

WINNER Stage Edinburgh Award 2019

FINALIST Offwestend Award for performance and video design

FINALIST Sit Up Award

FINALIST Mental Health Edinburgh Award

Baby Reindeer will play at the Ambassadors Theatre from April 2nd – May 2nd 2020. Over 500 tickets each week will be priced at £25 or less.

January 22, 2020/by Theatre M

Edinburgh Festivals Diary – Day 3

To Assembly Hall for a very special EIF performance. Ian McKellen is celebrating his 80th birthday by performing extracts across his career, from Gandalf to Shakespeare and a brilliant revival of his panto dame Widow Twankey.

The actor has already performed at 80 venues, raising £2 million for theatre charities by the time the current run ends in Orkney.

All profits from the tour will be used to support regional theatres and local drama provision. In Edinburgh, proceeds will support a bursary for an Edinburgh resident to study performance, as well as contributing to the refurbishment of the Drama Studio at Leith Academy, as part of the International Festival’s residency partnership with the school.

The show is a ebullient love letter to theatre and it is fifty years since McKellen last trod the boards at this somewhat intimate setting.

If that wasn’t enough, next month he starts an 80-date west end run at the Harold Pinter theatre, raising funds for theatre charities. It was an unforgettable afternoon of recital, high jinks and reflection.

Sir Ian McKellen shaking his bucket

As well as donating ticket sales, McKellen collects funds in a bucket after every performance and wherever he goes, donates the takings to a cause specified by the organisation.

I spot him on the stairs with collection bucket and hand over my loose change.

‘Carl! You get everywhere…’ said the octogenarian.

‘Like dry rot?’ I suggested, smiling.

‘Well, yes,’ he laughed, ‘but don’t worry, I still like you. Now give me your bloody money!’

Later, I head to Summerhall for Moot Moot.

You sometimes wonder what the second house Friday night at Glasgow Empire would have made of today’s Fringe acts and in Moot Moot’s case the answer is probably ‘torn to shreds’.

Moot Moot

It’s not entirely deserved, because their presentation is stylish and their creation of the world’s dullest radio chat show hosts ‘Barry and Barry’ are useful idiots, but their point about the futility of the format for meaningful discussion is made in the first five minutes and doesn’t survive even an Edinburgh hour.

After lunch I head to the Lyceum for Hard To Be Soft. Cast across fifty minutes and four episodes, the piece looks behind the masks of violence and masculinity to the inner lives of Belfast people.

Hard To Be Soft, Lyceum Theatre

Belfast street life and religious ritual collide with liturgical dance and verbatim performance. Choreographer Oona Doherty exudes a powerful authority in this EIF-show that ranges from solo interludes, to electric all-female hip hop crew to solo rooted in pitiless vastness. Quite something.

Taking time out from a relentless schedule is crucial. As is hydrating. I use the early evening to unwind, before heading back to Summerhall.

Gavin Jon Wright and Daniel Portman star in Kieran Hurley and Gary McNair’s Square Go

Square Go, one of a number of shows this year exploring toxic masculinity, revels in a charged, fun and occasionally demented adolescent energy as the Roundabout becomes a wrestling ring. Gary McNair and Kieran Hurley’s two-hander returns and it really is a highly entertaining and brilliant hour of Scottish banter.

My WhatsApp pings – a message from Park Theatre’s Founder and Artistic Director Jez Bond.

‘Right so tonight I will be at Abbatoir after my last show – about 11pm. Wanna join?’

‘Absolutely. See you later – don’t get too excited.’ I replied.

So, I walked to the Underbelly’s members bar at George Square – you need a shiny black card to slip in after dark – to be greeted warmly by Jez and his colleague Mark Cameron. The place is a kind of Soho House style for performers and industry folk in Bistro Square

I have a large glass of white wine and stand outside on the terrace – on my best behaviour, of course. My eyeballs usually freeze spending time in these kinds of places. But it was good to meet and chat with the cast and crew of fringe hit Four Woke Baes and see Jez.

Anyway, I’d rather scratch my eyes out than see a show at 11.55pm. But Richard Gadd’s intense 65-minute Baby Reindeer, also at Summerhall, was a hot ticket. This was one of thing several additional late night performance added due to demand. Jon Britain’s production is angry, revelatory and visceral.

Baby Reindeer. Photograph: Andrew Perry

It tells Gadd’s shocking experience of being stalked by a woman he met while working in a bar in London. Gadd delivers blistering insights into the horrifying failures of the police system.

(The police said they were unable to help.)

A transfer to Bush Theatre was announced in the wee hours of Friday morning – lucky London.

Ian McKellen On Stage runs from 20 September to 5 January 2020.

Hard to be Soft: A Belfast Prayer is at the Southbank Centre on 11 October.

Baby Reindeer runs at London’s Bush Theatre, from 9 October to 9 November.

August 24, 2019/by Theatre M