Revenge is sweet as Edinburgh Festival creep gets his comeuppance

The Herald Scotland

3 hours ago

When he goes to see Hayley Sinclair's terrible one-woman show about the climate crisis, he dashes off a typically excoriating review. Having filed his piece, he coincidentally bumps into Hayley at the Traverse, the two of them get talking and, without revealing his identity, Alex whisks her back to his flat to spend the night.
The next morning, when Hayley sees the review and realises that the man she slept with is the same one who has just ruthlessly demolished her show in print, she feels furious, humiliated and betrayed. But her revenge will be sweet. That night, she scraps her original show, revamping it as The Alex Lyons Experience, which not only reveals the sleazy, unethical way he treated her but invites audience members to chip in with contributions about the appalling treatment they've suffered at the hands of callous, duplicitous men.
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From an environmentally-themed show destined to sink without trace, Hayley's evening slot becomes the most sought-after ticket on the Fringe, a lightning rod for women's exasperation with cheats, creeps and rakes, and Alex achieves nationwide notoriety as an emblem of toxic masculinity.
Interestingly, the story isn't told from the point of view of either Hayley or Alex, but of Sophie Rigden, an art critic from the same paper who is staying in the same flat as Alex over the Festival. Naturally, she's disgusted with her colleague's behaviour, but seeing Alex day after day she can't help but start to feel protective of him now that he's become Public Enemy No 1 and finds herself bringing a more nuanced view to events.
We don't need to read Charlotte Runcie's bio to realise that she's done her fair share of Fringe reviewing: her account of Edinburgh at Festival-time is too accurate to be anything other than first-hand. And she weaves in a running theme of the role of the critic in an arts scene increasingly dominated by the TripAdvisor ethic.
Author Charlotte Runcie (Image: Gordon Terris)
Alex's strident declarations of the important work he's doing in helping to raise the standards of theatre, his high-minded claims to integrity and impartiality and his jibes about how Hayley has propelled herself to fame on the back of her encounter with him – none of them hold much water, but behind them Sophie can see a lost and somewhat bewildered little boy neglected by his mother, a theatrical Dame, who always put her art before her family.
The situation forces Sophie to question how honest she is in her own arts journalism and to reflect on her relationship with her late mother and the state of her marriage. This stint at the Fringe is the longest she's been away from her young son, and as much as she wants to see her baby boy again she has doubts about her future with her partner, Josh.
By highlighting Sophie's conflicted feelings, Bring the House Down steps back from being the kind of savage comic satire one might anticipate. It's funny, skewering both entitled men and the relationship between critics and performers, but Runcie's compassion overrides her killer instinct. In rejecting Alex's worldview, Runcie refuses to rate him either a one or a five, coming down somewhere in between and making this novel a gentle satire, with a heart.