It is just over 10 years since The Effect, a play which probes the neuroscience of love, premiered at the National Theatre. When a venue revives a contemporary play this quickly, either the playwright is a megastar or we’re looking at a cultural institution too Covid-battered to take many imaginative risks. In this case, it seems to be both.
Lucy Prebble was already well regarded by the time The Effect first landed in 2012. The Sugar Syndrome explored deception and abuse on the internet and won a round of newcomer prizes in 2003; ENRON premiered in 2009, then transferred to the West End and Broadway with its tale of financial mismanagement and corporate corruption. But it was The Effect that proved Prebble could be tender as well as clever.
This is a story of intimacy and vulnerability between two human subjects on a mysterious drug trial, watched over by two scientists with a history of their own. It’s sweet, sexy and endearing. Watching it again, it’s clear why The Effect won Prebble a Critics’ Circle award for best new play. Prebble has now won three Critics’ Circle awards for playwriting—and received much of the credit for the success of HBO’s Succession, for which she was one of the best-established figures in Jesse Armstrong’s writing room. For a National Theatre still trying to recover from the pandemic, a play with her name on it should be a safe bet.
There are a few updates, some superficial. Toby, the flashy lead scientist who’s made a fortune from pharmacology, boasts of driving a Tesla; the TV show The Wire is now a reference point for retro. British theatre has evolved since 2012; the National’s last production of The Effect featured an all-white cast, where this cast are all people of colour. Cheeky Tristan—who, once played by Jonjo O’Neill, seduced fellow guinea pig Connie by revealing himself to be a “Regional Junior Ulster Tap Champion 1994”—is now a breakdancing Paapa Essiedu, both streetwise and vulnerable.
Essiedu is one of the great actors of his young generation, as those who saw his 2016 Hamlet may know. He also has the gift of likeability—Taylor Russell’s wary Connie falls for him despite herself, and we don’t need to know whether she’s taking a love drug or a placebo to understand why. The young lovers are matched by Michele Austin and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith as Lorna and Toby, our older, wearier pair of medics playing gods. Holdbrook-Smith lends plausibility to Toby’s arrogance with a finely honed blend of intellect and menace, and it’s lovely to see the perceptive Austin given a well-observed theatrical role, after years of playing cops and nurses in every TV show going.
Yet although Austin does a fine job, the conceit of a doctor struggling with her own mental health and love life feels formulaic now—and perhaps always was. Lorna’s own boycott of antidepressants—despite being happy to experiment on her patients—is valorised to an extent that will alienate the millions of Britons who take antidepressants and find them helpful. It’s an odd moment of didacticism in a script largely content to raise questions without imposing answers. It’s odd, too, to watch a play about how to engineer love that misses the one relevant social revolution between 2012 and 2023: our normalisation of dating apps. When does the dopamine hit us during a Tinder romance, and who’s manipulating it? Prebble doesn’t ask.
The director, Jamie Lloyd, carves up bare space into white cells of light—it’s his familiar and often-overpraised schtick, but on this occasion it successfully distils the key narrative from a play at risk of spilling over with ideas. We even get a smart visual Hamlet reference: Toby, posing with a Yorick-like brain in a vat that might just be his Dad’s. It’s a solid revival. What The Effect lacks, a decade down the line, is urgency.
The Effect is on at the National Theatre until 7th October
