Theatre

The Brenda Line

Pitlochry Festival Theatre

Four stars

Working the midnight shift at the Samaritans is quite an eye opener for Karen, the eighteen-year-old volunteer and would be literary superstar in Harry Mould’s debut play. It’s sometime in the late 1970s, Margaret Thatcher is on the radio, the office is a riot of Formica and multi coloured carpet tiles, and dungarees are de rigueur in Natalie Fern’s period design work.

The Samaritans, meanwhile, are equally on trend with the so-called permissive society. The Brenda Line of the play’s title is a code for callers who want to talk dirty rather than offload their troubles in a more conventional manner.

Tonight’s Brenda is Anne, who takes all this in her stride as Karen takes the moral high ground, accusing Anne of all sorts of betrayals to the feminist cause she espouses, with little experience of life on the frontline of adulthood.

Anne and Karen may be ages apart, but beyond the ethical ambiguities regarding the Samaritans instigating The Brenda Line at all, they both have baggage of their own.

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Mould’s piece is a feminist spin on the sort of 1970s plays that were the preserve of a very male take on work back then. Here, the pokey office is an intimate backdrop that allows Anne and Karen to argue different worldviews like grown-ups, with all the tensions and contradictions that throws up.

Fiona Bruce as Anne and Charlotte Grayson as Karen rise to the occasion with rapid-fire wit over the play’s two short acts in Ben Occhipinti’s studio production. What emerges from their interplay is a rites of passage for Karen and a kind of mini confessional for both women that sees them bond across the generations.

As Anne’s hard-knock wisdom and Karen’s bull in a china shop idealism find common ground, it is not the heavy breathers on the end of the line that matter here. It is the women who find their voice.