Globe's emotional rescue

The brilliant Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal asked me, "Do Romeo and Juliet kill themselves? Or do their parents kill them by telling them they cannot be themselves?" In Brazil, he said, many young people believe that they are not going to live beyond 25 anyway, and so determine to live so recklessly that they fulfil their own conception.

I imagine the situations that Shakespeare explores in this summer's Globe season are familiar to Samaritans answering phones: my fiancé has accused me of unfaithfulness at our wedding; I found my bride with another man on the eve of our wedding; my daughter has been shamed in public by her bridegroom; I'm pregnant and my husband is dying; I am responsible for another man's death; I am trying to save my brother's life; I am in prison separated from my lover and child; my boyfriend left me because I didn't have enough money; I entrusted a group of people and they betrayed me; I hate the world I live in; I have been evicted; my parents are trying to force me to be someone I'm not; I saw my best friend killed in the street; I want to die rather than grow old; I just want to die; my daughter killed herself; my son killed himself.

Samaritans and Shakespeare share more than an interest in similar human situations. Like the work of Samaritans on their telephones, Shakespeare's plays use a simple method of speaking, listening, and connecting through sound. Per-sona: through sound are we known as persons.

At the Globe, we recreate physical, emotional and mental situations which might overwhelm us in the real world but which, in the auditorium of a theatre, can be experienced safely. I have learned that this is not unlike the training of Samaritans for telephone answering.

Pretend callers train the new volunteers by play-acting true-to-life situations on the telephone. Samaritans assert that we can all be Samaritans if we want to be. I think Shakespeare plays help to prepare us, through experience, for these emotional trials, if and when they arise.

Three friars play the Samaritan in Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing and Measure for Measure. One succeeds, through pretence, in transforming an emotionally distraught situation before death or at least further hurt is caused.

One tries to save all, fails, and contributes to the deaths of five young people, three murdered and two who take their own lives. One is a powerful man who disguises himself as a Samaritan in order to discover the cause and remedy-Shakespeare creates three stories of young lovers who face seemingly insurmountable obstacles to their loves and lives.

Their parents, family, and the authorities who might be responsible are too caught up in the emotions of the situation to be of help. Sometimes they are the cause of the situation. On the evidence of these plays, Shakespeare had strong feelings about the pressures placed on young people.

Isolation, the inability to express one's feelings, the inability to listen to others' feelings, low self-esteem - Samaritans and the Globe recognise these states of mind as potentially harmful to our emotional wellbeing.

We share the belief that help lies in our ability to hear and express our feelings with each other. Our plays this summer remind me that building a dam in the course of a young person's love is as dangerous and complicated a decision as trying to dam the Thames.

If such a decision needs to be made, we will require the services of an experienced emotional engineer, someone whose words understand the huge tidal force of our human nature.