Alicia Vikander has put herself in an almost comically stressful situation by agreeing to be in a play for which the ending hasn’t yet been written — even though, when I meet her, she and Andrew Lincoln have been rehearsing for two months and they open in two weeks. Sorry, “one week and six days”, as she puts it, looking slightly like a duck who has wandered too far from its pond and is starting to feel the breeze.
This is the unique thrill of working on The Lady From the Sea with Simon Stone, the playwright behind Yerma (starring Billie Piper) and Phaedra, who writes the scenes as he goes along and turns up to rehearsals with his laptop in hand, headed straight to the printer while the cast wait, agog.
