‘What do we do about obscene phone calls?’ This was a question Harry Mould encountered while researching their debut play, The Brenda Line, which opens at Pitlochry Festival Theatre this month. The question came from some of the women manning the phones for the Samaritans, the charity set up in 1953 to provide a sounding board and emotional support for those in distress, feeling suicidal, or who just needed to talk.
The answer to the question came in 1958, when the service that gives Mould’s play its title was set up. The Brenda Line (originally the Brent Line, until that district office objected) existed for the next three decades before being scrapped in 1987. For Mould, channelling its history onto the stage comes from a very personal place.
‘My mum was a Samaritan when she was very young,’ Mould says. ‘When she was about nineteen or twenty, she was the youngest Samaritan in Wales, and she had these funny little anecdotes she would tell us from around that time. One of these was about the Brenda Line.’
Mould remembered this during an extended illness when they would spend a long time on the phone with each other. This prompted Mould to look into the history of The Brenda Line, including its driving force, Samaritans founder Rev Chad Varah.
‘He didn't believe that these men should be turned away,’ Mould explains. ‘It was always men calling, and it was always women that they wanted to speak to. They put the phone down if they heard a man's voice. Varah’s whole thing was that he set up the Samaritans with the intention of providing everybody a listening ear, so they couldn't turn these people away because that would be against their core mission.’
It was the women, however, who interested Mould.
‘There seem to have been some women who thought that they were absolutely doing the right thing, and that The Brenda Line was providing a really vital service. Not just to these men, but also to the women in these men's lives. Then there are other women who look back on that period of time with real shame. I can't imagine how difficult it must have been providing that listening ear, treading that line between listening and being empathetic, but not encouraging. It was a really difficult line to tread.’
Mould has set their play in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher was first elected UK Prime minister.
‘You've got this woman in the most powerful seat in the country, but at the same time, conversing about sex, or being seen as sexually autonomous, was absolutely a no go for women. On top of that, a really significant proportion of these women who were volunteering as Samaritans were being recruited from churches, so you've also got God looming over the whole situation.’
The Brenda Line is very much on the women’s side.
‘I hope people will come out feeling a real sense of love towards the women who did it,’ Mould says, ‘because irrespective of why people called, the most important thing is that people always answered. But because these women were answering a tricky call, and because it was a subject that is still taboo, but in a more complicated way now, they've just been written out of history, in the way that so many women are. And if this little two hander in the Scottish hills can just be a little bit of an outstretched hand, and a wave and a thank you to the women who did this impossible, generous thing, then I'll be delighted.’
The Brenda Line runs in rep at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, 15thAugust–18th September, then at Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 13th-16th November.
The List, July / August 2024
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