Eileen Caiger Gray reviews The Effect at Crucible Theatre, Sheffield
is a play that won high praise at the National Theatre in 2012. It’s penned by Lucy Prebble, also writer of the hit show Enron, and it’s about a 3lb lump of jelly. The fact that the lump of jelly is a human brain means the issues, ideas and problems thrown up along the way are many and complex.
Complex too are the relationships of the four characters. Connie (Ophelia Lovibond) and Tristan (Henry Pettigrew) are two young students, paid volunteers in a trial of powerful anti-depressants. Toby (Stuart Bunce) the Pharma company’s director, who parades his father’s donated brain round in a bucket, is keen to discover and market a wonder-drug ( – perhaps even a Viagra for the brain!) while psychiatrist Dr Lorna James (Priyanga Burford), who is administering the trials, has mental issues of her own.
Amanda Stoodley’s set evokes mood and place splendidly, the whole auditorium, audience seats and flooring on all four sides included, are a sparkling, cold, clean, clinical white. Onstage the whiteness runs on uninterrupted – square white tiles, and two white blocks that serve as seats, beds or scanners for the guinea-pig students, dressed also in white. Clear and crisp too are the graphics and the soundtrack of rhythmic pulsings, beats and bubblings that heighten the tension. Even through the interval, tension and storyline are kept on simmer as a timed countdown of minutes and seconds bleeps and flashes outside the auditorium.
Not so clean and clear-cut, and far from black or white, is the drama of human emotions (or chemical reactions?) that plays out, messy and confused, in the lab, involving not just one ‘romantic’ liaison, but two. Just as in weekly copies of The New Scientist, questions, debates and dilemmas abound – scientific, moral, personal, and largely insoluble. When the two volunteers feel they may be falling in love, could it be, perhaps, merely a side effect of the trial drug? The drug, after all, is heavy with dopamine, a chemical that occurs naturally in the brain at times of joy and elation. But even then, does that invalidate their feelings? And what exactly is love? Is love itself a drug? What role does memory play in love? What if one of the pair is taking only a placebo?
Questions arise too in the Ben Goldacre realm concerning the role of marketing and profits. How are decisions made when it comes to cherry-picking or omitting data in the compiling and reporting of trial outcomes? How much research is truly objective? Toby’s cloned businessman-cum-politician’s smile and patter reveals something about that. Then again, is it right to attempt to control or manipulate the chemistry of the brain when, though all brains may look alike, it’s the brain that gives each of us a sense of individual identity, of self, even of soul. And what is depression? What causes it? What is normal? Is depression just one particular version of normal rather than, in fact, an illness? Perhaps a depressed view is a more realistic view. So, is Dr James right or wrong to refuse, for years and years, to take any medication for her own deep bouts of depression?
Peppered with humour and liberal portions of Gordon Ramsay swearing, this Gordian Knot of a play is a little contrived and clunky at times as it tries to cover a thousand and one bases, but the momentum of emotions and human unpredictability carries it along. A larger bubbling, crackling dose of real onstage chemistry between characters would be welcome, but there’s no magic potion for that either. Looking objectively at the reactions of a good proportion of the audience, though, it seems the experiment is actually pretty successful.
Eileen Caiger Gray
