Drawing on her own experience as an arts journalist, Charlotte Runcie comically skewers bad men, bad faith and (unforgivably) bad theater.
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.
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Source: Theater - nytimes.com
