What happens when an Edinburgh Fringe performer fights back against the critic who dissed her show, putting him under the spotlight on stage and on trial by social media and ends up with a hit? That’s the scenario in journalist and novelist Charlotte Runcie’s Bring the House Down, set in the frenzied atmosphere of the world’s biggest arts festival. Years as a reviewer for various publications, witnessing up close and personal the glory and devastation that result from chasing coveted stars, have inspired her debut novel which is a funny, thought- provoking roller-coaster of a read. It explores questions such as who decides what is good and bad art, why men can’t help behaving badly and how social media leads people into expressing an opinion on everything from politics to Posh’s family feud. In Bring the House Down, critic Alex watches performer Hayley’s show, rushes off a crushing one-star review for the next day’s paper then heads to a bar where he bumps into her and they spend the night together without him revealing who he is or what he has done. Next morning his colleague and flatmate Sophie unintentionally lets Hayley see the review and the performer turns her rage into revenge by including a judgement of his life and misdemeanours in her show, turning it into an immediate smash hit which destroys him and his reputation. “I really wanted to write something that was juicy and thought-provoking but most of all fun,” says Runcie. Runcie’s journalism career started out at the Fringe back in 2009/10, writing reviews as an intern when she was still an English Literature student at Cambridge for online websites and media outlets including The Scotsman. She became The Daily Telegraph’s arts critic and a radio columnist and arts writer and spent several years living in Edinburgh, reviewing live performances at the Festival. Describing herself as an ‘omnivorous writer’ the daughter of Scottish drama director Marilyn Imrie and James Runcie, writer of the Grantchester Chronicles which were adapted into the TV series, has also turned her talents to poetry and was a Foyle Young Poet of the Year, while her memoir, Salt On Your Tongue, was a BBC4 Book of the Week and Book of the Year in The Scotsman, the Spectator and Prospect. “I really loved the opportunity to go and see as many shows as possible, throwing myself into it. I learnt on the job at The Fringe and maybe that’s part of what I found troubling, because it sometimes felt like the blind leading the blind because I was maybe 19 years old reviewing a show by someone who’s never been to the Festival before, maybe only ever done one or two shows and never really been reviewed and so takes it very personally and it all felt quite raw, and improvisational. I certainly learned a lot of things the hard way. Particularly how personally people can take things.” Now approaching 36 and a mother of two, soon to be three, Runcie says she’s come a long way as a critic and is clear about what the job entails for her. “I think it’s a real privilege to take a piece of work someone has made and try to engage with it as thoroughly as possible and with what they were trying to do and with how effective it is and place it in the broader cultural context. “Some critics, and certainly Alex in Bring The House Down, think their priority is writing entertaining copy, which is obviously important, but you have a responsibility to, if this doesn’t sound too grand, the culture as well as the person who has made the work. “There’s something that in a fast-paced journalistic environment where editors are interested in just getting things on the page and out quickly with a headline that grabs and a nice picture that looks exciting, can get lost. It’s a very difficult balance to strike.” “I came from the experience of being a critic and thinking what if this revenge on a critic had extra complicating factors? I felt it was unwritten about and that critics are often portrayed as kind of snooty know-it-alls, disconnected, cultural figures who waltz in with a free ticket, cast judgement and vanish. Whereas I know from the inside that critics are human beings and it’s interesting to look at the person who’s written something that can provoke or upset or reinforce. What’s it like to be that person sitting at a keyboard formulating that text which is going to have a ripple effect? Runcie knows how personally a performer can take a review and in the frenzied atmosphere of the Fringe - during which performers unhappy with their reviews have been known to express their displeasure by sending underwear to writers or donning burlesque costumes and picketing publications’ buildings in the past - emotions can run high. “There was one occasion at the Fringe where I did a critical review of a comedian’s show, which I thought was fair, but she very much disagreed with. She Googled me and wrote an extra five minutes for her show based on what she found, mocking me and my family and my life and other things I had written.” Runcie laughs, time having given the memory perspective. “For the next couple of weeks of the Fringe I had people coming up to me saying ‘did you know you’re in this show and it’s so funny’. I thought that’s fair enough, I used my platform and she used hers and there’s not a thing I can do about it. “I personally thought it was unfair what she was saying, but she thought that what I had written was unfair, and I suppose you could say that is part of the magic of the Fringe, this live dialogue between audience, critic and performer. Because there are shows every night for a month where things can change and evolve, and that’s the joy and the thrill of it, and being part of it is an honour.” Did she go along to see the updated version of the show in which she now featured? “No, I was too much of a coward,” she laughs. “Also I thought if I go that kind of ruins it a bit, and just perpetuates it. She’s had her say and that’s fine. “This was a long time ago but over the years it stuck with me and forced me to ask myself questions about how much worse that could have been. “What if I’d been a man, that would have changed the power dynamic because women being reviewed by men is its own whole thing. And what if we’d had some kind of personal interaction as well where she’d felt doubly betrayed? Because at The Fringe, you constantly bump into everybody because there are a limited number of bars and clubs and this unique melting pot atmosphere. “I thought what if the critic had it coming, what if lots of people agreed they needed to be taken down a peg or two, then the story started to snowball in my mind and became this book.” With Fringe shows starting small and building by word of mouth to be sell out, award winners and going on to be global TV network hits, such as Fleabag and Baby Reindeer, the stakes are high for performers who might be sinking their life savings into staging a show. “I’ve seen very small shows with tiny budgets and no set and hardly any audience that get bigger and bigger then tour, then there’s a TV adaptation and five years later they have become huge. “If you’re a writer, comedian or director bringing a show to The Fringe you could lose thousands of pounds and sink without trace, or it could be the absolute making of your career. It could be life changing, and so for some critic to waltz in and say ‘ nah, a waste of time’, that’s really hurtful and the emotional stakes of that are so high. It can lead people to act in all kinds of extreme ways which is something I wanted to explore,” she says. Has Runcie ever been kept awake at night, wondering if something she wrote was too much? “Yeah. I think that’s healthy. I think you should. It’s a responsibility and I think it’s fair to the performer to think ‘did I get that right or not?’. Surprisingly it’s not the one star or five star reviews that cause the most furore but a seemingly innocuous three stars. “Three stars seems to be the rating performers hate the most,” says Runcie. “They say ‘why couldn’t you have just given it four?’ and ‘why couldn’t you have just understood it more?’ “I gave a one-man show three stars and he was really, really upset. He sent a complaint to my editor, said I hadn’t understood it, and my editor stood by me, said it was good writing and that I said I liked the show. It wasn’t even very critical but it did make me think, could I have been more generous? I don’t know. I still think about that one, because he was SO upset.” “I think people find it easier to dismiss one star reviews. They just think ‘this critic’s an idiot’, ‘they didn’t get it’, but three stars is quite wounding somehow.” In defence of critics who may find themselves in receipt of letters of protest, pants and picketing, it’s their job to give an honest opinion about a show the public are being charged to see, whether or not they might hurt the feelings of a performer, otherwise everyone would be awarded glowing five star reviews. “To be unafraid of being disliked is a good quality for a critic really,” agrees Runcie. But where the character of Alex definitely crosses the line is by not telling Hayley he’s a reviewer who has just publicly trashed her show and proceeding to have sex with her. “There is that,” says Runcie, who wanted to show the complexities of Alex’s character rather than write a pantomime baddy. “I wanted to explore likeability because in this late #MeToo era of holding people, particularly men, to account for bad behaviour, it is easy to dismiss a celebrity accused of something terrible if you have no connection to them. “But if someone who has been accused is close to you, a friend or colleague and they haven’t been fired and you have to keep working with them, and still in your life and particularly if the criminal justice system isn’t accusing them of a crime and prosecuting them but they’ve done something that you disagree with, that means you have to make your own decision about how far you want to keep this person in your life. “It’s complex and I wanted to make Alex funny, clever, likeable, with a sheen of celebrity and a bit of fame. Sophie likes being around him and even when he’s going through his downfall, he’s the centre of his own drama and she quite likes being adjacent to that. While all of the characters in Runcie’s book are fictional, speculation as to who the critic Alex is based on is rife. “I’ve had so many people say ‘you based Alex on this person’ and I’ve had to say ‘I don’t know who that is’ because he’s not based on anyone, none of the characters are. But he must be of a breed. I think that’s really telling how many men in media are like this,” she says. Even if you’ve never been to the Edinburgh Fringe and witnessed, as Runcie has, everything from shows in public toilets to poetry readings in a cupboard while being fed biscuits to watching a baby sleep or Shakespeare in Mandarin and comedy in Welsh, Bring the House Down touches a nerve with its discussion of how technology has made critics of us all. “What spurred me to write it was having worked as a critic, writing my opinion for newspapers and magazines, but also realising how much more widely criticism had become part of all of our lives in the internet era, and the social media era in particular. “It feels like there’s pressure to weigh in and have an opinion on any kind of event, especially any event which requires you to take a moral stance and we’re constantly being asked to pass judgement on things. “Even buying something online you get an email two days later saying can you rate it, how many stars? And I worry that there’s a corrosive, cumulative effect of all of this asking us to have opinions. Are we supposed to be having opinions on this many things? “It means when something major happens in the news we feel we have to make a statement on it, almost like we’re some kind of politician or celebrity even if we just have a private instagram account, like we have to have a stance. “We are all publishers now of our own opinions and that means that they can come back to haunt us.” “So even though the book is set in journalism and theatre and the Edinburgh Fringe, all worlds I know really well, I hope it taps more broadly into something that affects all of us or has troubled other people in the way it’s troubled me.” “Edinburgh is the only place where this story could happen, where there is a show that could change every night, where you could go and see a one-woman show in a basement and it could change your life,” says Runcie, “but it’s had an incredible international reaction. People are aware of Edinburgh as an international arts festival and there’s interest in how that happens and the people involved in making it, but there’s also interest in questions of complicity, revenge and the mistreatment of women too. I think there is maybe an international moment of exploring these themes, the late #MeToo effect.” As well as promoting Bring The House Down and working on another novel and a PhD, Runcie is waiting for the arrival of her third child. “I am writing another novel, also contemporary but it’s in the early stages where if I say too much about it it would change and then it would not be what I said it was. And despite living in Wales these days, Edinburgh in August still has a pull for Runcie. “The Festival has always been a massive part of my life and I’ve been going to see shows my whole life because my parents worked in theatre, and so does my sister, and I lived in Edinburgh for several years. Whenever I say I’m not going to be in Edinburgh this August, something happens and I’m always there. This year I’m going to have just had a baby so I thought there’s no way I’m going to go, but I’m up for a week because I’ll be appearing at the book festival. And I’m going to bring the baby.” “It’s quite daunting, the book coming out and the baby at the same time. I keep accidentally saying ‘I’m publishing a baby’,” she laughs. Publishing a baby or birthing a book - they sound like exactly the sort of late night Fringe shows Charlotte Runcie would love to watch and give a star rating. Bring The House Down by Charlotte Runcie, The Borough Press, Hardback, eBook and audio, £16.99 Charlotte Runcie will appear at Edinburgh International Book Festival on 19 August, www.edbookfest.co.uk