How to take revenge on a critic
After giving a bad review, critic Charlotte Runcie found herself written into a comedian's show - an experience which has now inspired her own debut novel
By Kate Wyver
It was a damning review. Painting an unflattering portrait of the comedian’s crudely-carved Edinburgh show, Charlotte Runcie wrote with humour and bite. Her two meagre stars and pointed comments were not, unsurprisingly, the words or the rating chosen to print out and staple onto the poster.
Some performers ignore their critics. This one took her revenge. “She Googled me to find out everything she could,” Runcie cringes, “and added a five-minute bit into her routine about how awful I am.” It was the early 2010s, our lives already open to being rifled through online. At the tinderbox of the fringe, with everyone at the same venues and the same bars, Runcie was plagued with people telling her about the set: “Have you heard you’re in this show?”
Runcie’s sickly, gut-clench response became the fuel for her new novel, Bring the House Down. What might have happened, she wondered, had the power dynamics of her experience of review-and-revenge been heightened? “What if I had been a man and she had felt personally slighted by a misogynist attack?” she wonders. “Or what if we’d had a personal interaction before or after the show where she felt betrayed?” In Bring the House Down, Runcie takes this situation to the extreme, conjuring a critic who sleeps with a performer immediately after he files a coruscating one-star review of her show. Runcie’s gobbleable story gives us a car crash played out onstage, night after night after night.
In the early stages of her career, Runcie worked widely as an arts critic, writing for tiny websites and big national papers, and editing for The List magazine. For ten years, she worked on the arts desk for The Telegraph, spending the last five as their radio critic, while her first book was the non-fiction exploration of women and water, Salt on Your Tongue, published in 2019. Bring the House Down is her debut novel.
Talking over Zoom, our conversation quickly devolves into the deeply embarrassing experiences we’ve had as critics. Runcie is not alone in the mortification of being hauled up onstage for an unfavourable review. Last year, a friend told me that I – and my three star review – had been folded into the script of It’s a MotherF*cking Pleasure, a show that satirises ableism and mercilessly mocks its critics regardless of whether they like or loathe the show. Perhaps becoming a part of the performance shouldn’t have been a surprise, but I later found out that at the end of each show, they handed out badges advising audiences: Don’t Be Like Kate Wyver. For this, I would have appreciated a heads up.
In a situation like this, who has the power? “I had been able to criticise this performer in print and people took me seriously,” Runcie weighs up, thinking back to the two-star review that sparked her novel. “But I was a nobody.” The piece had been for a popular reviews site, but she hadn’t been paid for it, and she wasn’t yet a professional full-time journalist. The comedian, though further along in her career, had undoubtedly risked a significant amount of money to be at the fringe. “But she had a platform for another couple of weeks to say whatever she liked about me.” What does one party owe the other here?
“It was embarrassing and difficult,” Runcie reasons, “but sort of fair enough.” A comedian’s show is an evolving one-person performance. Runcie’s review was simply new material for her to play with. And it must feel good to turn the attention back onto the reviewer who slips silently into the theatre and largely avoids any repercussions of their words. “There is a kind of glee in taking down a critic,” Runcie notes. Her novel rolls this idea to the edge of a cliff then tips it over into a total personal dismantling.
Alex Lyons is the novel’s main event. A chauvinist narcissist from a famous family, he is terrible but appealing. “I love writing someone that you love to hate,” Runcie says with delight. The book’s breathless unravelling begins when Alex sleeps with Hayley Sinclair, the recipient of his one-star review. Her reaction the morning after is burningly theatrical, as she rips up her script and rebuilds her show to be all about him, wringing out his long list of personal and professional misdemeanours. “I was talking to a friend about the most embarrassing things that could ever happen to you,” Runcie explains, “and I said: what if all of your exes got up onstage and said all of the bad things you'd ever done? His face dropped. That's the feeling I want people to have.”
The story isn’t told from the perspective of Alex (“that would be so self-justifying”) or Hayley (“she’s in the right most of the time”) but Sophie, a less established critic grappling with her opinions: she likes Alex but despises what he’s done; she loves thinking about art but feels sick giving a bad review. Runcie’s experience as a critic is wrapped up in Sophie’s anxious musings about what it means to write negatively about something other people have poured their hearts and cash into. “You have a responsibility to be honest – not mean, but fair,” Runcie says about the act of criticism. “But people's feelings get hurt. I have felt a huge amount of guilt and responsibility for that over the years.”
As press comes out around the book’s publication, Runcie is about to be on the other side of the reviews, but she says with certainty that she is not tempted to read what people write about it. “The only way to be immune to criticism is to accept in your heart that you are not going to read it,” she insists. She grew up in a theatrical family – the messy, stagey world Alex evolved in is borrowed from her own life – so she saw the way artists engaged unhealthily with critics’ words. “Reviews are for other people,” she says. “They are not a school report.”
This inner peace with criticism hasn’t always come so easily. In her early twenties, when she was writing for online magazines, she would obsessively read the comments on her articles, several of which had pile-ons. “It just felt like an onslaught.” Much easier not to read the negative ones. But even the positive reviews of Salt On Your Tongue she found hard to face, preferring instead to remove her attachment to the critical response. “It’s like eavesdropping on other people’s conversations,” she laughs. “It doesn’t feel like any of my business.”
Distancing yourself from a review for a show that you must perform again the next night is surely in a different league of self-containment. “I really feel for them,” a PR whispers to Sophie, as news of Alex’s actions spreads. “I do think you need a heart of ice to be a reviewer.” This line stood out: there is a common idea that critics hold some kind of morally superior disdain for what they write about, which has always bemused me.
“Critics get into it because they love it,” Runcie cries. “Every time you see a show, you want it to be great.” A three-star review of a play you wanted to love but were disappointed by is much harder than a five of something you outright adored. But the even-handed threes are the reviews people tend to find least satisfying. A friend no longer speaks to me because I gave his show three stars. Strangely, I almost think he would have been happier with the certainty of a two.
“People don’t like reading three star reviews,” Runcie says, offering this as fact rather than opinion. But it's broadly true that readers don't like them because they want to be told whether they should see the show or not, and artists and PR teams don't like them because there aren't easy quotes to pull for the posters. “I often feel critics are goaded into being more extreme,” Runcie says. She toys with this in Alex, his skin thickened and his writing sharpened by the indifference of readers to a nuanced critique. “His reviews had gradually become more extreme,” Sophie tells us, “and eventually, he’d resolved, as far as possible, only to give shows either five stars or one star. Everything in between was air.” In a mass culture demanding reviews for every interaction, the stamp of five stars loses its value, coming to mean “the baseline, rather than the outstanding.” Alex weaponises this shift in thinking to serve himself, the rarity of his approval making it increasingly desired.
I suspect there is an extra layer of discomfort for a critic to read Bring The House Down, with so much of it feeling as if it has been ripped from a diary scribbled frantically at the fringe. But for anyone on the other side of the star rating, the book also provides a simple, vicious action plan. Should you desperately want to avenge a critic, you don’t need to go to Hayley’s extremes. The mere threat of it is enough.
Simply find the person who has wronged you on paper, sidle up to them in a bar, and whisper in their ear. “Have you heard you’re in this show?”
Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie is published by Harper Collins on 5 June
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Gosh, great interview and the book sounds butt-clenchingly thrilling. My one: Richard Herring blogged about how I didn't get that his misogynistic joke was actually a meta-joke quoting someone I didn't know and how that went over my head. I was honoured that he took the time to write about it. Still love his work.
The most notorious example of a performer taking revenge on a critic is probably Tim Minchin's response to Phil Daoust's scathing Guardian write-up. Daoust was immortalised in an expletive-peppered song. If it was me I'd have probably been quite flattered that they'd taken that much trouble to bite back. But then I'd have also been flattered to see badges with my name on them! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okGUN3fNhzM