Miles beamed at her in welcome. ‘Everyone, this is Holly.’ The others chorused their greetings, looking bemused at her arrival. ‘And we have Genevieve via Skype.’ He gestured at a laptop propped up on a stool. There on the screen was Genevieve, looking effortlessly lovely. She appeared to be sitting on a couch in some kind of House & Garden heaven.

‘Sorry not to be there,’ she said. ‘I’m dialling in to save you all from this rubbish cold.’

Dialling in? Could you do that? Since when was that an option? It was just like Genevieve to think she was too good to come to a reading. She had been sick when Holly had been her understudy as well. With what, Holly didn’t know. How many times could she be sick?

As the others moved about, adjusting chairs and so on, Holly leaned towards the laptop and said, ‘You’re in the wars, Genevieve. It isn’t as serious as last time, I hope?’

Genevieve gave her a frosty stare. ‘It’s just a cold,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘All good?’ said Miles. ‘Cool, let’s crack on.’

Holly knew some of the other faces there, people she’d worked with or met before. The script was an adaptation of an early Chekhov play, an unfinished, untitled work that was rarely performed. The main male character was named Platonov, so this was what the play tended to be called in English. Genevieve was playing his young love interest, Holly the widow of a general.

‘So,’ said Miles, ‘we’re in a big garden in the spring of 1881. The background is that Anna is the (still smoking hot) widow of a once-great general.’

‘Thank you, thank you,’ Holly said.

‘She’s had to mortgage the house and hasn’t paid the servants, but she’s throwing a party for her friends, because why not. Remember, this is the first time we hear about this friend of theirs, Platonov. We haven’t met him yet. We’ve heard of his reputation. He’s supposed to be a man who exemplifies the modern age.’

They resumed the reading from where they were up to.

‘“In fact,”’ said someone sitting across the circle from Holly, ‘“Platonov put this rather well. I remember he once said: ‘We have advanced in our attitude to women. But even advance turns out to be a kind of retreat.’’ ”

The actor playing Nikolai Triletzky, the doctor, read, ‘“Yes, well, that sounds like pure, unadulterated Platonov. What was he? Drunk?”’

It was Holly’s turn. ‘“What do you think, my friend? What is your view of Platonov?”’

‘So,’ broke in Miles, ‘what do we think about Platonov at this point?’

‘I feel he’s the kind of guy who would wear a fedora,’ said Holly.

‘I have a fedora, I could bring it in,’ said Rhys Bateman, who was playing Platonov. Rhys was a tousle-haired actor of some talent and good looks.