The Effect: A Play About a Scientific Experiment That Feels Like One

By Frank Scheck

★★★☆☆ Jamie Lloyd directs this London revival of Lucy Prebble's drama about two test subjects in a drug experiment falling in love.

Your senses are instantly stimulated upon entering the Griffin Theater at The Shed. The venue is so dimly lit that you can barely find your way to your seat. Throbbing EDM music is blaring at such a loud volume that conversation is virtually impossible. And there’s a long, rectangular strip at the center of the auditorium that features LED lighting. You don’t know whether you’re about to see a play or spend the night dancing at the hippest club in town.

It turns out to the former, specifically Lucy Prebble’s The Effect, a drama which premiered at London’s National Theatre in 2012 and was first seen here in a 2016 off-Broadway production directed by David Cromer. This production (which just received an Olivier Award nomination for Best Revival) originated last year, also at the National, and is directed by perhaps the hottest stage director currently working, Jamie Lloyd.

This play concerns two twentysomethings who participate in a medical experiment in which they’re taking a new, experimental anti-depression drug, which apparently requires them to be locked up in some sort of asylum and undergo constant medical supervision. Tristan (Paapa Essiedu, I May Destroy You) is an unaffected, working-class bloke with a playful streak, while Connie (Taylor Russell, making her stage debut after scoring major indie film success with Bones and All and Waves) is a more restrained psychology student from Canada.

The pair’s progress is overseen by two doctors: Lorna (Michele Austin), who suffers from depression herself, and her supervisor Toby (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), with whom she had a past romantic relationship. The doctors sit at the ends of the wide stage, observing the action and, in the case of Lorna, occasionally interacting with the two participants. They’re dressed in all-black clothing, while the experiment subjects wear all-white jumpsuits. Because, why not? It looks cool.

As attractive young people cloistered together are wont to do, Tristan and Connie develop an attraction for each other, with the flirtatious Tristan doing his best to further it along via such methods as performing a sexy hip-hop dance routine for her amusement. But their falling in love raises the play’s central questions: Is it happening organically, or as a result of the medication? And what if one of them is not actually taking the drug, but rather a placebo?

It’s a theme well worth exploring in an era when it sometimes seems like virtually everyone is ingesting some sort of mind-altering drug, whether recreationally or pharmaceutically or both, and wondering if their feelings are real or chemically induced. But the playwright, who went on to become an executive producer and writer on the hit HBO series Succession, doesn’t explore the provocative idea in particularly interesting fashion. While the central courtship is at times charmingly depicted, the writing proves so schematic and artificial that the play not only takes place in a lab but feels like it was written in one as well. This is particularly the case with the melodramatic conclusion in which one of the characters suffers a terrible reaction to the experiment.

Lloyd only emphasizes the play’s weaknesses with his sterile production that makes you feel like you’re observing lab rats from a distance. The actors’ voices are loudly amplified, making even their most intimate dialogue sound ring announcements at a boxing match. The sound and lighting effects, including portions of the stage floor lighting up strategically, are so emphatic that you expect a white-suited John Travolta to strut onto the stage and dance. You get the feeling that if the director had his way, he’d be wiring up audience members with sensors to gauge their reactions.

It’s all so…sterile. So calculated in its effects that The Effect, which has thankfully undergone some trimming since its original production, feels even colder than necessary. Especially when contrasted with Cromer’s staging, which, with the exception of a few stylistic flourishes, mainly presented the material straight and managed to wrest some genuine emotion from it.

It’s no fault of the performers, with the two leads so appealing you can’t help but feel invested in their characters’ fates. Austin is subtly moving as the doctor who begins to have doubts about the methods she’s employing, and Holdbrook-Smith has such a soothing, silky voice that he’d make a killing doing ASMR videos (it was all I could do not to ask him for a prescription during the curtain call). But their efforts are undercut by Lloyd, who, much like Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy, practically screams, “I’m directin’ here!”

The Effect opened March 13, 2024, at The Shed and runs through March 31. Tickets and information: theshed.org