John Daly-Peoples
The Effect by Lucy Prebble
Auckland Theatre Company
ASB Waterfront Theatre
April 16 – May 11
John Daly-Peoples
Straight off a highly acclaimed season at London’s National Theatre, Auckland Theatre Company is presenting The Effect, written by BAFTA, Golden Globe and Emmy award-winning co-executive producer and writer Lucy Prebble of the HBO international hit series, Succession (2018-2023) in their 2024 line up.
“The Effect” will be directed by Benjamin Kilby-Henson (King Lear) and feature major stage and screen stars including; Jayden Daniels (Head High, Celebrity Treasure Island), Zoë Robins (Amazon’s The Wheel of Time), Jarod Rawiri (Long Day’s Journey into Night) and New Zealand screen legend Sara Wiseman (Under the Vines, Creamerie).
British playwright and producer Lucy Prebble shows all the razor-sharp flair that made her a star writer on Succession in this deft dissection of medical ethics and the nature of human attraction.
The review of the work in the New York Times gave it a strong recommendation.
“Are you in love, or are you merely experiencing a giddy dopamine rush? Are those two states even meaningfully different? Is there a true, innermost “you” that is distinguishable from your neurochemistry?
These are some of the tricky questions explored by Lucy Prebble’s thought-provoking play, “The Effect”
The play revolves around two young people, Tristan and Connie, who take part in a trial for a dopamine-based psychiatric drug with powerful antidepressant properties. Initially, they seem to have little in common — he’s a working class lad from East London; she’s a bougie psychology student from Canada — but as the trial progresses, a tender rapport develops.
Throughout the study, the participants are monitored by two psychiatric doctors, Lorna and Toby, who debate their findings: Is the drug pulling their subjects together, or are their feelings organic? And if one of the trial participants was actually receiving a placebo the whole time, what then? Prebble keeps us guessing.
Throughout, the pair’s gradual transition from wary awkwardness to intense mutual magnetism is convincingly rendered, in large part thanks to the actors’ terrific onstage chemistry.
Things get messy in the latter stages of the experiment, as both the doses and the emotional stakes increase, leading to a fraught and affecting denouement.
The stiltedly ambivalent friendship between the two middle-aged doctors provides an intriguing subplot. We learn that Lorna and Toby once romantically involved, many years ago. Lorna is prone to bouts of depression, but refuses to take medication; Toby, on the other hand, is a true pharmaceutical believer.
“The Effect” is healthily skeptical about scientifically deterministic approaches to emotional well-being, channeling a dissenting tradition that dates back to the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s; its moral sensibility recalls Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The play’s revival is particularly timely as a new generation of wellness gurus have, in recent years, latched onto the idea that much of human behavior can be explained away as neurotransmitters or hormones simply doing their thing.
Prebble invites us to ponder the implications of such thinking. Connie is initially uncomfortable with the notion that two people can fall in love just like that (“It takes work,” she insists), and wary of her attraction to Tristan. He, in response, makes the case for mystery, and thus articulates the play’s key message: That a world in which all feeling is viewed as a matter of chemistry would be a bleak one indeed.”
New Zealand Arts Review 