Golden Globe winner and two-time Olivier Award recipient Ruth Wilson will perform in The Second Woman, a 24-hour endurance theatre and live cinema production at the Young Vic Theatre in London, running from 4pm on Friday 19 May to 4pm on Saturday 20 May 2023. The production, created by Australian artists Nat Randall and Anna Breckon, casts Wilson in a single scene repeated 100 times opposite 100 different men, non-binary and queer people – none of whom she has rehearsed with.
The Young Vic, located at 66 The Cut in Waterloo, was founded in 1970 by Frank Dunlop as an offshoot of the National Theatre, on a bomb-site where 54 people sheltering in a bakery died during the Second World War. Laurence Olivier described it as a place to “develop plays for young audiences, an experimental workshop for authors, actors and producers.” The venue was designed by Bill Howell at a cost of £60,000, originally intended to last five years. A major rebuild by Haworth Tompkins was completed in 2006, and the main house seats 420. Nadia Fall became artistic director in 2025, succeeding Kwame Kwei-Armah.
The Second Woman is co-produced by the Young Vic and LIFT – the London International Festival of Theatre – and presented in association with House of Oz. The piece takes inspiration from John Cassavetes’ 1977 film Opening Night, in which a theatre director grapples with the psychological collapse of her lead actress. Randall and Breckon transpose that premise into a durational format: Wilson plays Virginia, a woman in a relationship that has lost its creativity, while each iteration introduces a new Marty drawn from open casting calls.
The scene runs approximately seven minutes. Over 24 hours, with only brief 15-minute breaks every two hours, Wilson performs it 100 times. Among the professional performers who appeared alongside her were Andrew Scott, Ben Whishaw, Idris Elba (Wilson’s former Luther co-star), Toby Jones, Sopé Dìrísù, Tom Burke, and director Edgar Wright. Most participants were non-actors. Casting was overseen by Nina Gold, the BAFTA-winning casting director responsible for Game of Thrones and The Crown.
The dual-screen format is central to the work. The stage offers a wide-angle view of the live action, while multiple cameras capture real-time close-ups projected onto a screen adjacent to the performance space. An all-female-identifying and non-binary crew operated the cameras and mixed the footage live. The video design was created by EO Gill and Anna Breckon, with lighting by Amber Silk, Kayla Burrett, and UK designer Lauren Woodhead, set by FUTURE METHOD STUDIO, movement direction by Yarit Dor, and music by Nina Buchanan.
Wilson, born in Ashford, Surrey in 1982, graduated from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in 2005. Her television breakthrough came with the title role in the BBC’s 2006 adaptation of Jane Eyre. She achieved wider recognition playing Alice Morgan in the BBC crime drama Luther alongside Idris Elba across five series between 2010 and 2019. Her performance as Alison Lockhart in Showtime’s The Affair (2014–2018) won her the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Television Series – Drama in 2015. From 2019 to 2022, she portrayed Marisa Coulter in the BBC/HBO fantasy series His Dark Materials, winning the BAFTA Cymru Award for Best Actress in 2020. She was appointed MBE in 2021 for services to drama.
Wilson’s stage career includes two Olivier Awards: Best Supporting Actress for Stella Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Donmar Warehouse in 2010, and Best Actress for the title role in Anna Christie at the same venue in 2012. She has received two Tony Award nominations on Broadway, for Constellations (2015) and King Lear (2019). In 2017, she starred in Ivo van Hove’s Hedda Gabler at the Young Vic.
The piece was originally performed by Randall herself in Sydney in 2016 and has since been staged internationally: Alia Shawkat performed it at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York in 2019; Laara Sadiq in Toronto; and Zhu Zhi-Ying at the Weiwuying National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts in Taiwan in 2018. Each iteration adapts to its local cultural context while retaining the core structure.
The Guardian awarded the London run five stars, calling it “a stunning creative feat, from concept to execution.” Fest magazine also awarded five stars, describing it as “an addictive and revelatory work of performance art.” Wilson told Time Out London: “The pitch was: 24 hours on stage, one scene, 100 actors – or 100 male participants, non-actors. And I instantly said yes. They knew: Ruth will do this. I thought: this sounds mad, I’ll never get offered anything like this again.”
A feature documentary capturing the performance is being produced by Fremantle’s premium documentaries label Undeniable, directed by Ursula Macfarlane (Untouchable, Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me), with Wilson as executive producer alongside Mandy Chang and Linda Brusasco.
The Young Vic has long cultivated a reputation for work blurring the boundary between theatre, cinema, and performance art. The Second Woman extends that tradition into territory closer to installation art, inviting audiences to stay for 24 minutes or the full 24 hours. The Cut Bar served hot food and drinks throughout to sustain overnight audiences. Tickets were sold on a rolling basis, with on-the-door availability from 4pm on 19 May. Best availability was expected between 10pm Friday and 10am Saturday – the graveyard hours when most theatres are dark. For Wilson, it represented the most extreme test of her endurance as a performer. For the Young Vic, it confirmed the venue’s commitment to work that interrogates what theatre can be when the clock refuses to stop.
