The Effect review

How do we go on with our finite little lives when the world is in flames? Is depression a rational response to calamity, or a pharmacologically fixable chemical imbalance? And what about love – thunderbolt connection of hearts, bodies and minds, or mere dopamine hit? Lucy Prebble – ingenious dramatist and writer of TV smash Succession – wields these questions with surgical skill in her play, set over the course of a clinical trial for a new antidepressant. First seen starring Billie Piper at the National Theatre in 2012, it returns in a production by Jamie Lloyd that is tender, thrilling and elegantly brutal. 

Prebble has tweaked the text to allow for some up-to-date cultural references and subtly reshaped it around Lloyd’s staggeringly fine four-strong cast. Her writing is glittering and mercurial – it has wit and vividness, yet it’s also remorselessly clear-eyed. And there’s a compulsive, sweaty-palmed tautness about Lloyd’s staging, a sense of suppressed panic. It’s as if we are watching its experiment in real-time, and by the devastatingly open ending, as the damaged participants limp away, we feel almost appalled at ourselves for sitting by, enthralled voyeurs, at the spectacle of so much helpless suffering.

Lloyd splits the audience in two, a little like the left and right cerebral hemispheres. We’re seated on either side of a traverse stage that, designed by Soutra Gilmour and lit by Jon Clark, glows scorching white, and is otherwise bare aside from two chairs and a brain contained, with pungent irreverence, in a bucket. Slashing, laser-like beams and geometric spots contain and corral Paapa Essiedu’s Tristan, a rudderless Londoner and veteran of clinical trials, and Canadian psychology student Connie (Taylor Russell). 

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