The fraught relationship between performers and critics is never more fiercely tested than during the Edinburgh Fringe. Thousands of artists jostle to gain attention for their dreams and passion projects during the intense, claustrophobic month, eager to be hailed the next Fleabag or Baby Reindeer. Yet a year’s (or even a lifetime’s) work can be blithely dismissed with the quick flick of a reviewer’s poison pen.

Charlotte Runcie’s debut novel, Bring The House Down, weaponises the Fringe’s artist-journalist dynamic with its story of casually womanising theatre critic, Alex, and Hayley, the actor who sleeps with him, oblivious to Alex having just penned a one-star panning of her one-woman show. Discovering his betrayal the next morning, she transforms her production into a public excoriation of his misogyny, a sensational reckoning for Alex with every woman he’s ever wronged and an agenda-setting cause célèbre.

Runcie, a former arts journalist for the The Telegraph, The Guardian and this magazine (as well as an acclaimed poet and memoirist who grew up in a theatre-producing family), has lived in, worked in and loves Edinburgh and its festival. But she admits that she struggles with reviewing.

‘It feels both a huge responsibility and quite overblown at the same time,’ she explains. But it’s especially intimate during the Fringe. ‘If you’re reviewing film or music, there’s a sense of physical distance,’ she says. ‘But Edinburgh is a small city, you’re bumping into the same people, comedians and actors, drinking in the same places, writing about them in ways that they might strongly disagree with or take exception to.

‘You have a duty to your readers to be honest. But also a responsibility to be fair to the artist. And like any critic, I’ve written things that have caused offence. A comedian talked about me in her show and I felt very exposed by that, the realisation that we had competing platforms. Who had more of a right to their say? What was the right of reply?’

Sharpening all this with a sexual dimension, in a context where the costs of staging a show and the stakes are huge (‘you can land a Netflix deal or sink into obscurity’), the dramatic possibilities burst out of Runcie’s mind. She says the ‘cloistered setting’ of the Fringe encourages ‘really rapid responses and escalation, people behave more extremely; relationships blossom or explode because there are so many parties, so many opportunities to meet someone. But it also made me focus on the things that trouble me as a critic.’

Despite the dwindling number of professional reviewers and broader fears that the festival itself is sleepwalking into irrelevance by pricing out performers and audiences, Runcie believes that dedicated, informed critics will be more important than ever in an era flooded with social-media opinion and increasingly prominent AI-written inanity.

Meanwhile, as the likes of Russell Brand and P Diddy attract headlines for alleged sexual misdemeanours and cancel culture opens up an anti-diversity front, the character of Alex presents an interesting proposition. He may be an absolute shit and nepo baby to boot, but he’s done nothing illegal and he’s not easily dismissed as a depraved monster, at least not by the novel’s narrator, fellow journalist Sophie.

‘He’s done all of these horrible things to women. But they would never have trusted him if he wasn’t good-looking, funny and clever,’ Runcie points out. ‘What’s interesting to me is what would any of us do when a person accused of bad things is our friend? Or someone we work with? They haven’t lost their job and you don’t want to lose yours. I didn’t reach many strong conclusions about whether his behaviour was predatory. But it felt really important to explore.’

Bring The House Down is published by The Borough Press on Thursday 5 June; main picture: Sophie Davidson.