If psychopharmaceuticals can regulate our brain chemistry, can they make us fall in love? That’s the provocative question at the heart of Lucy Prebble’s 2012 drama The Effect — which is getting a slick and absorbing revival at The Shed. Director Jamie Lloyd’s production, first mounted last year in London, sizzles with sensational performances by an unlikely couple: Tristan (Paapa Essiedu, I May Destroy You), a working-class Londoner who’s a master of riz, and Connie (Taylor Russell, Bones and All), a thoughtful and reserved Canadian who’s studying psychology at university. Essiedu and Russell radiate an onstage chemistry that is almost palpable.
The problem, beyond their backgrounds (and Connie’s ongoing relationship with an older, married professor), is that their meet-cute has occurred while both are subjects in a six-week trial for a new antidepressant. What if this crush is just a side effect of chemically induced boosts in dopamine? What would it mean if one of them was in the control group and getting a placebo instead of the real drug?
Prebble widens the scope of these questions with a subplot about two older physicians, the cucumber-cool psychiatrist overseeing the study (Michele Austin) and her boss and ex-lover (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), who needs the trial to work to push the drug onto the market. Austin embraces her character’s contradictions as a gloomy depressive who resists antidepressants for herself while showing an almost maternal concern for her subjects, while Holdbrook-Smith uses his velvety bass voice to encapsulate the sort of TED-talking big man who shows only casual concern for others in his supposedly altruistic quest for success.
Lloyd’s flashy staging heightens the sci-fi qualities of the script, which unfolds over nearly two intermissionless hours like a black-and-white film you might find on TCM late at night. He seats the audience on both sides of a narrow runway of a stage, boldly lit by LED lights from above and glowing panels from below (by Jon Clark). George Dennis’s sound design and Michael “Mikey J” Assante’s cinematic score contributing to the sensation of disorientation, along with Soutra Gilmour’s monochromatic set and costume design. Together, the audience gets a voyeuristic sensation of disorientation that matches that of Tristan and Connie.
Prebble raises a lot of interesting questions about psychiatry, medicine, and whether human feelings can be reduced to biochemistry — and she stumbles a bit in later scenes that feel more arbitrary and less grounded in reality. But in the end, The Effect succeeds on the strength of Essiedu and Russell’s magnetic performances as guinea pigs who know all too well that they are guinea pigs.
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