Ruth Wilson is a goddess and right now I hope she’s having a lie down. At 4pm today, minutes before I filed this article, the star of Luther and His Dark Materials completed a performance of the gruelling 24-hour play The Second Woman at the Young Vic Theatre, acting out a variation of a single short scene with 100 different men, none of whom she had rehearsed with.
There were, of course, a few famous names – actors Ben Whishaw, Sopé Dìrísù, Andrew Scott and Tom Burke; Wilson’s Luther co-star Idris Elba and Toby Jones towards the end; writer Jack Thorne and director Edgar Wright – but most of them were amateurs. They were of different shapes, sizes, ages and ethnicities, and included a drag queen, the writer and presenter Anna Richardson and the editor of ES Magazine, Ben Cobb. Some were aggressive, some romantic, some comical.
