EdFringe Review: Hold The Line

Sam MacGregor’s Hold the Line takes its audience into the pressured world of an NHS 111 call centre, where the phones never stop ringing and lives can turn on a single decision. Based on MacGregor’s own experience, the play captures the exhaustion, absurdity and human weight of the job with an immediacy that is both engaging and unsettling.

For most of the performance, MacGregor inhabits the role of Gary, a conscientious but worn-down call handler. Seated at a desk with headset in place, he fields an unending stream of enquiries – some trivial, some life-threatening – with only a screen, a script, and his own judgement to rely on.

Through him, the audience experiences the relentlessness of the work: the repetition of set questions, the bureaucratic hurdles, and the fear of missing a cue that could prove fatal. Gary’s quiet desperation is drawn with empathy rather than caricature, and it grounds the play in something recognisable and humane.

MacGregor is joined onstage by Gabi Chanova, who takes on multiple roles that flesh out the world beyond Gary’s desk. She voices anxious callers, plays unsympathetic managers and embodies colleagues whose own coping mechanisms range from gallows humour to indifference.

“Based on MacGregor’s own experience, the play captures the exhaustion, absurdity and human weight of the job with an immediacy that is both engaging and unsettling.“

Her versatility adds texture to the performance, preventing it from becoming a monologue and giving Gary’s struggle a social as well as personal context. Together, the pair create a workplace that feels both heightened and authentic.

The play’s most striking passages come when it resists embellishment. A scene in which Gary talks a suicidal caller down is performed with understated calm, allowing the stakes to land without melodrama. Elsewhere, a patient slipping into a diabetic coma is handled with urgency that underlines how fragile the system can be. These sequences give the production its emotional weight, moments where MacGregor and Chanova let silence, pauses, and hesitations do tremendous work.

Humour is threaded throughout. Skits parody management culture, and at one point, a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? spoof offers comic relief. These diversions reflect the absurdity and coping mechanisms of life inside a call centre, but they don’t always transition comfortably from/into the more serious material. Such tonal shifts from satire to sincerity can feel abrupt, and a few comic passages possibly overstay their welcome, threatening to blunt the urgency that drives the piece.

The staging is deliberately sparse – a desk, headsets, and minimal props – mirroring the claustrophobic monotony of the workplace. It reinforces the sense of confinement. This performance squarely relies upon the commitment of its two actors, who use voice and physicality to create a vibrant reality.

So, even if it’s a touch uneven, Hold the Line remains a powerful piece of testimonial theatre. It communicates the strain carried by those who must keep calm while others panic, the impossibility of always getting it right, and the human cost of working within overstretched systems. Exhausting and honest in equal measure, it gives voice to the people on the other end of the phone, asking what it means to hold the line when the system itself is at breaking point.