The Effect

This is London

Playwright Lucy Prebble isn’t afraid of tackling complex topics and making them both accessible and entertaining. In her smash hit Enron she took on the intricacies of the financial manoeuvres which destroyed the eponymous energy giant. Now, with equal success, she’s turned her attention to even more labyrinthine subjects – love and the human brain.

The Cottesloe has been transformed by designer Miriam Buether into the reassuringly soft-seated lime and red premises of a pharmaceutical company where psychology student Connie and laidback Irish Tristan (he’s done this before, the fee is to finance his travelling) have enrolled as healthy guinea-pigs in a new anti-depressant trial conducted by precise, unsmiling clinical psychiatrist Lorna.

Locked away in the clinic for weeks, and despite the ban on sex and smoking, it’s hardly surprising that a relationship – sparked into life during a flirtatious exchange over urine samples – grows between Connie and Jonjo O’Neill’s raffish Tristan. But are the changes registering on their brain scans the neurological results of the drug, the natural euphoria of new love – or is the attraction itself merely a pharmacologically induced emotion?

Prebble has obviously done her homework, but she displays her knowledge unobtrusively, integrating information with romantic entanglements past and present, and bringing Lorna into conflict with her boss (Tom Goodman-Hill) over their differing ideas of the reality of both life and experimentation.

Rupert Goold directs with his customary flair, eliciting completely convincing performances from the four-strong cast, with Billie Piper vulnerably sincere as Connie and Anastasia Hille’s Lorna hiding her own damage behind a screen of rigorous professionalism in this tender and intelligent co-production between the National and Headlong which provides – how could it? – no easy answers.

 

Cottesloe