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In ‘Bring the House Down,' It's the Critic's Turn to Get Panned
In ‘Bring the House Down,' It's the Critic's Turn to Get Panned

New York Times

time08-07-2025

  • Entertainment
  • New York Times

In ‘Bring the House Down,' It's the Critic's Turn to Get Panned

BRING THE HOUSE DOWN, by Charlotte Runcie How cruel may a critic be? I ask for a friend. David Niven was once dismissed as 'tall, dark and not the slightest bit handsome.' (He hung the review in his bathroom.) John Simon described Barbra Streisand's nose in 'A Star Is Born' as 'a ziggurat made of meat' bisecting the screen like 'a bolt of fleshy lightning.' Having never gone further than calling an actor confused or miscast, I find such put-downs shocking. But they pale in comparison to Alex Lyons's review of Hayley Sinclair in a one-woman Edinburgh Festival Fringe production called 'Climate Emergence-She.' After disemboweling the script, Lyons turns his attention to its author and star. 'Hayley herself is so tedious, and so derivative,' he writes, 'that after you've endured the first 10 minutes of what the venue is loosely calling 'a show,' you'll be begging for the world to end much sooner than scheduled.' Should Lyons, the lead critic at a major British newspaper, be canceled for that? How about if, in the hours between writing the pan and its publication, he picks up Sinclair at a bar and sleeps with her? She reads her one-star review in the morning, not knowing until then that the man she spent the night with was its author. And does it change the moral calculus if Lyons was right? The show sounds truly dreadful. Those are the questions heating up Charlotte Runcie's debut novel, 'Bring the House Down,' which enjoyably pours fuel on both his and her sides of the dispute. Lyons is basically a #MeToo straw man, so grossly cavalier and indifferent to the sensitivity of other people, especially women, that you'd want to cancel him just for existing. Nor does Runcie make Sinclair a shining heroine. In a canny and commercial act of revenge, the character instantly revamps 'Climate Emergence-She' as 'The Alex Lyons Experience,' dredging up the history of the critic's indiscretions and releasing the monster of internet rage. With its parade of guest star exes and its bonus semi-nudity, the new show is the hit the old one could never be. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

An actor turns the tables on a brutal critic in ‘Bring the House Down'
An actor turns the tables on a brutal critic in ‘Bring the House Down'

Washington Post

time06-07-2025

  • Entertainment
  • Washington Post

An actor turns the tables on a brutal critic in ‘Bring the House Down'

In his 1878 travel book 'Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes,' Robert Louis Stevenson declared that his native city wouldn't appeal to everyone. 'For all who love shelter and the blessings of the sun, who hate dark weather and perpetual tilting against squalls, there could scarcely be found a more unhomely and harassing place of residence,' he wrote. In Charlotte Runcie's Edinburgh-set debut, the weather is the least of her characters' problems. For the man at the heart of the book — and at the center of a potentially reputation-destroying and career-ending furor — the Scottish capital proves to be 'unhomely and harassing' as a result of his reckless actions and ruthless words. 'Bring the House Down' plays out during the Edinburgh Fringe, the annual arts festival that comprises a dizzying range of actors, musicians, comedians and artists. Runcie, who is British, spent years as a journalist reviewing shows at the Fringe, and she channels her experience of the event in general and cutthroat criticism in particular in her accomplished novel. Alex Lyons, chief theater critic at a London newspaper, is a man of extremes who awards shows either five stars or, as is more often the case, one star. 'Anything in between was air.' At the Fringe, he writes a lacerating review of American performance artist Hayley Sinclair's first-ever one-woman show, 'Climate Emergence-She.' Later on, Alex meets Hayley at a bar and takes her back to his place for a one-night stand — while conveniently neglecting to mention his hatchet job, which has gone to press. When Hayley reads the review the next morning and discovers the man she slept with is its author, she fights back. Retitling her show 'The Alex Lyons Experience,' and repurposing it into an excoriating character assassination of the unscrupulous critic, Hayley immediately has a hit on her hands. As her story goes viral, her show expands to spotlight the widespread harm Alex has caused as both a critic and a philanderer, and to examine new ways of calling out and stamping out misogyny in the arts. Alex's colleague — and Runcie's narrator — Sophie Rigden looks on in awe as Hayley captivates her audience. 'It was like watching Botticelli's Venus come to life as a hipster enchantress,' she observes. 'She was essential, elemental, primordial with commanding rage.' While Hayley enjoys, and harnesses, her newfound fame, Alex crashes and burns. At one pivotal moment, it looks like it might be more than his career that goes up in smoke. Sophie tries to offer him support, but soon she is buckling under the weight of her own problems. Her workload multiplies when she takes over Alex's duties. Her emotional strain intensifies: She is mourning her mother, desperately missing her young son at home in London, wrestling with conflicting feelings for her previously unfaithful partner and weighing up the consequences of a drunken encounter. Can she regain control and come out on top like Hayley, or is she destined for disaster like Alex? This is a smart, sharp and compulsively readable first novel that provides food for thought on a variety of complex topics. A less skilled writer would have adopted a strident tone and resorted to speechifying during the passages that engage with themes such as male power and privilege, or publicity, notoriety and cancel culture. However, Runcie strikes a perfect balance, and instead of tub-thumping or finger-pointing, explores each issue with nuance and evenhandedness. She is especially insightful on both the criticism of art and the art of criticism. 'Personal recommendation has been replaced with consensus,' Sophie muses. 'We rely on there being hundreds of people rating everything, a critical mass of approval.' A novel isn't carried by its big ideas alone. It needs strong characters to convey them and react to them. Fortunately, Runcie's creations are forceful presences, all the more so because they are intriguingly multifaceted and resist cut-and-dried classification. Hayley is hell-bent on getting justice, yet there is more to her than a woman scorned or an avenging angel. Similarly, Alex has harsh judgments and selfish motives, and is given to 'tricking women into thinking he could give them what they wanted, only to maim them emotionally the moment they opened themselves up,' but he is no mere one-dimensional hate figure. Sandwiched between the two is Sophie, at once a 'sarcastic, sceptical, media-savvy hack girl with a flip answer to everything' and a sensitive young woman with divided loyalties who refuses to cast aspersions on either party. All of which sounds serious and thought-provoking. This is only partly true, for the novel is also fun and frequently witty. The dialogue sparkles. Alex's mother, acclaimed actress and 'national treasure' Dame Judith Lyons, steals scenes. Throughout, Runcie showcases the giddy whirl of the Fringe with its lively crowds, wild parties and madcap acts ('Hamlet' performed on a bouncy castle, confessions to the 'Chill Pope' conducted in portable toilets). Alex justifies his brutal takedowns by arguing that 'people like reading bad reviews.' They also like reading good books. 'Bring the House Down' is one such book: not a one-star flop but a five-star triumph. Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Economist, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and New Republic. By Charlotte Runcie Doubleday. 304 pp. $28

John Boyne on Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie: Toxic masculinity steals the show
John Boyne on Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie: Toxic masculinity steals the show

Irish Times

time01-07-2025

  • Entertainment
  • Irish Times

John Boyne on Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie: Toxic masculinity steals the show

Bring the House Down Author : The Borough Press ISBN-13 : 9780008688011 Publisher : Charlotte Runcie Guideline Price : £16.99 One of the most talked about television shows this year has been Netflix 's Adolescence . Toxic masculinity lay at the heart of that programme, albeit in the form of a 13-year-old boy. Charlotte Runcie's debut novel Bring the House Down explores similar territory, only with a character some 20 years older who is so oblivious to his mistreatment of women that its exposure seems as surprising to him as it is to everyone else. The premise is brilliant: Alex Lyons, a well-known theatre critic, reviews a one-woman show by Hayley Sinclair at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He hates it – to be fair, it does sound terrible – then goes to a bar where he writes an eviscerating, one-star review, files it with his editor for publication the next day, and then, by chance, runs into the performer . They chat and share a drink before going back to the flat he's sharing with a colleague, the novel's narrator Sophie, where they have sex. At no point does he tell her who he is or what he's done. The following morning Hayley reads the review and all hell breaks loose. [ Adolescence: Why can't we look away from Netflix's hypnotic hit? Opens in new window ] I don't want to give away exactly how Hayley wreaks her revenge, but suffice to say that the third chapter of this extraordinary book left me open-mouthed with a mixture of horror and laughter. From there, the book focuses on the remaining weeks of the festival, when Hayley becomes a star, Alex becomes a pariah, and Sophie becomes increasingly estranged from her boyfriend while growing closer to her disgraced friend. Runcie spares us no detail of Alex's colourful love life over the years but, wisely, she never allows her anti-hero to have committed any actual crimes. He's just a good-looking guy with a privileged upbringing and a great job who's spent his adult life using women for his own sexual gratification while never giving their feelings a second thought. Refusing to accept any responsibility for the pain he's caused, he continues to defend his behaviour in ways that only add to his downfall. READ MORE Alex's reaction to being challenged by people he considers his social and intellectual inferiors reminded me of the arrogance and narcissism of the former television actor turned right-wing provocateur Laurence to task on Question Time in 2020, Fox was so outraged at being criticised for his ill-informed views on race that he effectively imploded, losing his career and decrying on social media how England is overrun by foreigners, burning Pride flags, posting unflattering pictures of women who've called him out, and losing multiple libel cases. Fox has learned nothing from his public disgrace and Alex feels deliberately created in his image, not least because he's also the son of a famous English thespian and has grown up surrounded by acting royalty. His sense of entitlement is astonishing, as is his utter conviction that in reviewing plays, and condemning most of them, he is, 'elevating the culture'. Which he's not. Only the artist can elevate or degrade the culture; the critic simply comments upon it. Bring the House Down is a powerful read, although there were a few moments that might have been excised. At times, Runcie – herself a former theatre reviewer for The Telegraph – allows Sophie's festival anecdotes to feel more like autobiography than fiction, such as when a US journalist expresses her disbelief that she has no formal training. And when Hayley, towards the end of the book, remarks that 'women are the strongest creatures on the planet', a character could have questioned this generalisation. After all, there are plenty of awful women out there, just as there are plenty of awful men, and decency is not restricted to one sex or the other. A few years after the #MeToo scandals, Bring the House Down is a timely reminder that even though the news cycle has moved on, the behaviour that inspired it continues, courtesy of men such as Andrew Tate , Donald Trump or Conor McGregor , and a global media that hangs off their every word, amplifying their voices despite their having treated women in ways that anyone with any moral convictions would decry. Politicians fell over themselves to tell people they watched Adolescence with their teenage sons. They could do worse than buy them a copy of this novel as well.

Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie review – the joy of the hatchet job
Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie review – the joy of the hatchet job

The Guardian

time20-06-2025

  • Entertainment
  • The Guardian

Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie review – the joy of the hatchet job

When Jesus is pressed to condemn the woman taken in adultery, he says, 'He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.' No one does, and a lesson in critical generosity is learned. Judge not, that ye be not judged. Is giving an artist a one-star review an act of abuse – casting the first stone? Is it worse when the reviewer is male and the artist female? That's the starting point of this entertaining and very timely debut novel from Charlotte Runcie, an arts journalist who, as a young intern, was lambasted on stage by a successful standup to whom she'd given a bad review. Alex Lyons, chief theatre critic for a national newspaper, is known for his hatchet jobs. It's the Edinburgh fringe, and he's sitting through a one-woman standup show. 'The solo performance artist, Hayley Sinclair, had a lot to say about the climate emergency, the patriarchy, and the looming end of the world, which was fair enough, but unfortunately her show was so terrible that, by half an hour in, Alex had decided that he actually wanted the world to end as soon as possible.' Instead, immediately after bashing out his one-star review, he goes to a bar, encounters an emotionally exhausted post-show Hayley, and invites her back to the flat he is sharing with another journalist, Sophie Ridgen. It is only the next morning that Hayley, after spending the night with Alex, reads the eviscerating, career-ending words he has written about her: 'a dull, hectoring frump, like one of those 1950s cartoons of housewives beating their husbands with a rolling pin'. Alex blithely walks in from his morning shower to find Hayley with his brickbat in her hands. It is a delightfully excruciating scene, setting in motion one of the most enjoyable novels I've read in a long time. Although as a male reviewer of a female artist, for a national newspaper, who by chance read much of the book on the train south from Edinburgh, I experienced moments of very meta-terror and mischief. Wouldn't the most fun review to write, but even more to read, be an absolute slating? Wasn't I, too, being tempted to cast the first stone? Luckily, Runcie's verbal wit, narrative chops and emotional subtlety rendered that impossible. Alongside a fringe festival retelling of the history of the #MeToo movement, we also get a will-they-won't-they plot and an inside account of so-Alex-has-been-publicly-shamed. Because, in reaction to her awful one-star review, and the one-night stand, Hayley transforms her one-woman show into 'The Alex Lyons Experience' – a one-star review of Alex's entire life and an immediate star-making media sensation. She retells the story of her encounter with Alex, then opens the stage for other women to share the appalling things Alex or other Alex-like men have done to them. And as clips from the show go viral, resonating far beyond a small function room below a pub and bringing forth similar stories from thousands of women, it starts to seem as though most men – all men? – are deserving of similar humiliation. And if not that, then a good digital stoning. As the Black Mirror episode Nosedive foretold, these days we are all but forced to participate in a culture of constantly rating one another. Midway through the novel, Sophie finds herself getting self-hatingly drunk at a festival party. There was an interactive customer feedback device propped up on the bar. Tell us what you think of our service, it said, and underneath there were two buttons you could press: an angry red face or a smiling green one. Excellent or worthless, nothing in between. Review your experience, share your thoughts, recommend us to your friends, swipe left, swipe right, leave a comment, have an opinion. Everyone's a critic. But shouldn't we be more forgiving? Like Jesus. When he was born, his father only gave him one star. Toby Litt is Head of Creative Writing at the University of Southampton. Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie is published by Borough (£16.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.

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