‘Elder millennials,’ said Holly. She high-fived with Rhys, while Genevieve looked on, saying nothing.

Genevieve was the other puzzle in all this. Watching her rehearse, Holly was struck by a stiffness in her performance, a lack of confidence perhaps. It was strange – she didn’t remember her being like this at drama school. She thought back to Miss Julie. She hadn’t seen her rehearse for that; she was called in only when Genevieve dropped out. It was an eleventh-hour thing, much to Holly’s good fortune. There wasn’t the budget for an understudy in the true sense – someone who learned the part during rehearsals, ready to step in if needed. Instead, ‘understudy’ was a euphemism for ‘replacement’, with Holly coming in cold and learning the part from scratch in days. She got the call because the casting manager happened to know her work. The director told her she made the play more ‘interesting’, by which she knew he meant that she wasn’t as pretty as Genevieve. Reviewers offered more backhanded praise.

In a happy piece of miscasting, we have Holly Murchison as Miss Julie. She turns Strindberg’s most biting (and most moralising) play into a thrilling maelstrom. Come for the car-wreck plot, stay for the sparkle and subversion.

There’d been much talk of the chemistry between Holly and the male lead, Owen Rennes, who played the servant Jean. That was a surprise, considering that in real life she found Owen a damp squib. He was very withdrawn; he hardly looked at her, in fact. Anyway, the play had put her on people’s radar. She started getting phone calls, invitations to audition. A string of character parts followed, some on stage, some on screen.

Now here was Genevieve condescending to appear in Miles’s production. No, that was unfair, putting it like that. Miles was a talented director. Holly knew she tended to downgrade anything she was involved in; it was a bad habit, as Ben said whenever he caught her at it. Nevertheless, she wondered at Genevieve’s motives. She was probably doing the play to maintain her cred as a theatre actor after her film and TV roles, wanting to avoid being seen as a starlet. Whatever the reason, here she was with the rest of them, acting the ordinary mortal in a smock-style shirt and glasses, sitting cross-legged with a highlighter at the ready. It was like another actor Holly knew of, a guy who shot to fame with his role in a period drama. He continued to edit a small literary journal, reminding the world that before he was a star he read English at Oxford and was an intellectual, thinky person with intellectual, thinky friends.

Holly wasn’t the only one in the cast struggling with the play. It was Chekhov, yes, but Chekhov in his throw-everything-into-the-laundry-basket phase. ‘It’s a big old jumble, let’s be honest,’ said Peter Novak, the actor playing Dr Triletzky.