The Effect at the National Theatre: A pulse-quickening exploration of love in the age of medication
Rarely does a play tackle quite so succinctly and powerfully our inability to reconcile the mass of grey jelly inside our heads with the impossibly complex tangle of desires and emotions that make us human.
Jamie Lloyd, one of the finest directors working today, brings Lucy Prebble’s play kicking and screaming – often literally – back to the National Theatre a decade after it was first staged. Back then Prebble was riding high after the success of Enron; this time she’s riding high after the finale of Succession, the comedy drama on which she was a key part of the writing team.
Time has dulled none of this play’s sharp, unruly edges, with the audience dragged through a strange, whirlwind romance that Prebble uses as a lens to refract the entirety of the human experience.
It follows Tristan (Paapa Essiedu) and Connie (Taylor Russell), two human guinea pigs in a live-in trial for a new antidepressant. He’s a rough-around- the-edges charmer, she’s a highly strung Canadian student in a relationship with an older man.
Initial flirting leads to barely repressed desire and before you know it they’re sneaking into each other’s rooms at night and having a wonderful, filthy old time (they’re wearing mics so you can hear every wet squelch as they suck each other’s faces).
The problem is, is any of it real? Can it be love if it’s chemically induced? And aren’t we all just chemicals floating in a big, stretchy skin-balloon any- way?
Then the side effects start to kick in…
Completing the four-hander are two psychiatrists with a thorny shared past: the down-to-earth Dr Lorna James (Michele Austin), who struggles with her own mental health, and her now- boss, the hilariously oily Dr Toby Sealey (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith).
While the young couple ask the big questions about love and life, James and Sealey provide a commentary on the role of medicine in psychiatry, jousting over whether sadness and depression are something that can – or should – be “cured”.
Just walking into the Lyttelton theatre is disorientating – gone are the familiar rows of padded seats, replaced by two opposing banks of amphitheatre-style pews that loom over a bare stage.
A lighting rig hangs low, zipping up and down to paint the cast in various shades of painful white, and underlit panels glow beneath them, standing in for cubicles and beds and test chambers. All the while the quickening pulse of a synthesised heartbeat ramps up the tension.
The decision to cast black actors in the four roles, as well as subtle but deft updates to the script, add a sense of contemporary urgency, too. “I’m a working class black woman,” spits an exasperated James, “Getting out of bed is a political act.”
It’s a lot to balance despite the simple premise but Lloyd holds it all together masterfully. When The Effect’s slight 100 minutes are up you’ll feel like you’ve been through your very own experiment, such is the whirlwind of emotions you’ve been through.