'The play was more like a gig or a football match

Ruth Wilson’s 24-hour show at the Young Vic was a true phenomenon and won her our Editor’s Award. Nick Curtis talked to her

- Nick Curtis

IT was like being in a gig, a football match or a festival,” says Ruth Wilson, recalling the audience reaction to her performance of The Second Woman at the Young Vic in May. In this experimental drama, the 41-year-old played the same short scene 100 times, with 100 different men, most of them amateurs and all of them without rehearsal, over a 24-hour period.The audience, many of whom queued for several long stints or did the full 24 hours, grew progressively more raucous as time wore on. The one-off show took theatre out of the arts pages and onto the front pages and became a bona fide London phenomenon. On Sunday it won Wilson one of two special Editor’s Awards at the 67th Evening Standard Theatre Awards; the other went to Sir Elton John for bringing his collaborative musical spirit to theatre.

“To be recognised in this way is wonderful,” says Wilson, over tea in a café near her flat in SE1. “It was a risky piece that felt outside the box of traditional theatre. I definitely thought there’d be no one there between 3am and 6am — and I was worried it might be boring. But I wanted to do it because I was missing things like that in this country, the excitement of something new and fresh and unknown. And the interest in it proved other people are hungry for that, too.”