‘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
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.