Photo by Marc Brenner

The Effect by Lucy Prebble – National Theatre: Lyttleton, London

Ten years on from its National Theatre premiere, with Billie Piper and Jonjo O’Neill, The Effect is back and it proves the staying power of Lucy Prebble’s writing. The staging, directed by Jamie Lloyd and designed by Soutra Gilmour has plenty of wow factor. The Lyttleton has been reconfigured with seating under the proscenium mirroring the stalls opposite. In the middle, a catwalk of a stage glows sci-fi white. Spaces for each scene are defined by glowing squares and intense downlighting, creating a setting outside of time in some unspecified past/present/future. Costumes are white, for the two drug trial test subjects, black for the two doctors. It looks very cool.

The Effect is structured through parallel relationships. Connie (Taylor Russell) and Tristan (Paapa Essiedu) are signed up to a residential trial and are falling for each other, but is just the drugs? Are they in control? And what is control or choice if everything we do is governed by brain chemicals. Dr Lorna James (Michele Austin) and Dr Toby Sealey (Koba Holdbrook-Smith), running the trial, have a past and a complex relationship. The play is a subtle, clever commentary on depression, pharma, and power relations between men and women. It benefits from four excellent performances. Essiedu is funny, manic and unpredictable, in contrast to Russell’s character who is self-contained, repressed even, and on the brink. They play beautifully together. So do the two doctors, separated by the full width of the stage. We can tell that we are only seeing a small part of who Austin really is, and that so much is held back. Holdbrook-Smith, whose bass voice is astonishing, is all front, concealing just as much.

The Effect is undoubtedly a modern classic, given a thrilling, engaging staging that shows how little Prebble’s work has dated. The questions she asks – the way the medical profession treats depression, how the pharmaceutical industry twists truth for profit, and how little we understand our own minds – remain entirely current.