The Effect, National Theatre's Cottesloe, SE1 - review

Billie Piper stars in Lucy Prebble's profound play on a developing relationship in an antidepressant clinical trial, but is the love for real, or just a chemical romance?
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Henry Hitchings17 June 2014

It is more than three years since the premiere of Lucy Prebble’s last play, the smash hit Enron. Her absorbing follow-up, dubbed a ‘clinical romance’, has been well worth the wait.

Rupert Goold’s thoughtful production is lit up by scintillating performances. The cast includes Billie Piper, appearing for the first time at the National Theatre. She and Jonjo O’Neill are thrillingly good as two participants in a medical trial. He is charismatic and skittish; she is fidgety and soulful.

The drug being tested is an antidepressant. Neither Piper’s Connie, a psychology student, nor O’Neill’s Tristan, a genial idler, is suffering from depression. They hamper attempts to monitor the trial and quickly start to break the rules. Their connection evolves from light flirting into something more passionate. When the dosage is stepped up, they turn into delirious lovebirds. Is this the result of the pills they’ve been taking, which promise to be ‘Viagra for the heart’? Or could it simply be a natural development?

As their doctors, Lorna and Toby, Anastasia Hille and Tom Goodman-Hill are just as arresting. It turns out that they have their own romantic story, and Toby’s messianic zeal conflicts with Lorna’s strictness and scepticism. Goodman-Hill is especially impressive when wringing defiant monologues from within himself, while Hille perfectly conveys the ways in which Lorna’s clipped manner covers up her vulnerability.

The play’s subjects are big ones: sanity, the nature of love, the role of placebos in medicine, the meaning of that layered word ‘chemistry’. It taps into the current enthusiasm for neuroscience – in particular the more spurious forms of rhetoric about how the mind works, which Steven Poole in a brilliant programme note calls ‘the junk enlightenment of the popular brain industry’.

Goold directs with clarity and wit, eliciting acting that is boldly physical yet also often achingly delicate. There’s a slick design by Miriam Buether, which converts the Cottesloe into the waiting room of a smart private clinic, as well as suggestive projections by Jon Driscoll and some haunting music by Sarah Angliss.

Crucially, Prebble has written a profound and stirring play. The material is complex but always accessible, the drama serious and informative yet deeply human, with the odd jolt of piercing humour. The Effect confirms her as one of the most intelligent voices in British theatre.

Until February 23 (020 7452 3000, nationaltheatre.org.uk)

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