‘That’s like life, though, isn’t it?’ Genevieve said.

‘Sure, but we’re charging money for people to come and see it. I don’t think they’ll be impressed by three hours of jumble,’ said Holly. (By this time, Miles had whittled the play down to three hours, thank god.)

Holly practised delivering her lines with gusto. This was Anna’s best quality, she’d decided, her gusto. There was something extraordinary about her, which came from knowing her own desires and voicing them shamelessly. Like the time after the party, when instead of going to sleep she rode over to Platonov’s house on her horse and propositioned him in the bushes, saying, ‘Smoke me like a cigarette and throw me away.’

Holly loved inhabiting that side of the character, but had trouble with Anna’s blind spot when it came to Platonov. ‘She doesn’t see the problem with his behaviour,’ she said to Ben one night. ‘She’s always excusing him. It’s like she’s his biggest enabler.’

‘She’s human,’ he said.

This was on one of the nights when he helped her with her lines. It was good of him to do this. It wasn’t all that long since he had given up acting himself. He had quit with the idea of doing something easier. Something more Ben-friendly, he said. He thought about being a paramedic in the NHS but settled on a job in a commercial property management firm. It was not creative in the slightest and he found this oddly freeing, an unexpected relief after the years of acting. He was always beautifully generous about helping her with her work, however. That’s what Ben was like, generous to his core.

In this telling of the story, the version that Holly told herself on a daily basis, she disliked Genevieve; that was all. Yet in certain moments she could acknowledge that there were other possible narratives, perhaps more honest ones. A different telling might make it a story about envy.

Did Holly envy her? God, yes. She envied Genevieve’s easy ride. No years of slog for her. Whereas Holly just felt tired. For her, acting was never not a hustle.

And wasn’t this closer to the truth, closer to the bone? Genevieve represented what had eluded her, represented a certain effortlessness. For Holly, who pinned her hopes on a slower-build career, things still felt precarious, every small success hard won. Platonov had come when she was getting traction, but she didn’t yet trust her own success. What if the next role didn’t come? Or the one after that, or after that?