‘The Effect’ is a new play by the playwright Lucy Prebble, author of ‘ENRON’, which explores the issues of depression, love, sanity and neurology. With a small cast of four, the play is based around a drugs trial for anti-depressants and focuses on two of the patients, Connie (Emily Parrett) and Tristan (Luke Brady) and the relationship that develops between them whilst on the drug. The other two characters are a psychiatrist, Lorna (Natasha Hyman), and the doctor who is supervising her, Toby (Peter Chicken). Having recently been shown at the National Theatre starring Billie Piper, Spotlights decided to put it on in the brand new Pegg Studio Theatre in the Union. They produced a slick, thought-provoking, gritty adaption of Prebble’s extremely profound and relevant insight into mental health. Her Campus had the opportunity to talk to the cast and crew after the performance to hear all about their thoughts on the production.
One of the producers, Amelia Lupton, explained how the play encourages us to re-think the way we view mental health. She said ‘it could be but just like if you cut your knee you put your plaster on it, if you have a chemical imbalance you need to sort it out. Personally I think it’s quite a good thing to tackle through theatre.’ Indeed, in the play Toby delivers an extremely passionate and poignant monologue about the wonderful yet fragile nature of our brains. He argues about the epidemic of depression in our society and the positives of treating it with medication. I asked one of the other producers, Ailsa McKay, about whether she felt this subject was particularly relevant for a student audience and she remarked that it was, ‘especially at our age we think that we are going to live forever and can’t really imagine anything like depression, when the reality is that it effects a lot of people’. The character Connie is actually a Psychology student, and her role acted as a reminder to the audience of students about the way that we do not tend to acknowledge our mental health as a fundamental part of our well-being. Emily Parrett explained about the research that she had to do before delving into the role. She told us that ‘last year I was in a play which was relatively similar in the themes, like in how I had to be in my angry scene with Tristan. So I went by how I was feeling then, and then I just kind of imagined myself being in that situation’. The relationship portrayed between Connie and Tristan is extremely intense, flipping between feelings of hate and love. It is also extremely physical and this was shown through the effective and tasteful choreography. The audience watches a physical fight between the two characters and also them making love on stage, both acts made even more intense by the set up of the traverse theatre. If you’re not looking at the characters acting then you’re staring straight into the eyes of the audience opposite you and this makes for an extremely intense environment, mimicking the one that the characters themselves are subjected to.
The intensity of the subject matter of course had a lasting effect on the actors themselves as Peter Chicken talked about the way it changed his views towards depression; ‘I remember when I watched the play, all the preconceptions I had about depression and antidepressants as medication just went out of the window. You see four different people with starkly contrasting viewpoints and each says something virtuous, it’s not that you necessarily agree but there is something you take away from each character and it’s amazing because it leaves you feeling not actually knowing what to think.’ This element of ambiguity also resonated with Natasha Hyman as she spoke about the disparity between ‘what it actually means to be depressed, and the state which my character ends up in where you literally can’t move’. Claudia Lee, one of the directors, spoke about Lucy Prebble’s unique writing style and in conjunction with this ingenuity the staging was simple yet extremely innovative. With two large hospital beds that moved around the stage and two screens which projected various medical images like heartbeats and drug dosages, it was clear to the audience that we were in a scientific, clinical environment. Claudia talked us through the inspiration for the staging; ‘I think what we wanted to do was to create a sense of duality throughout the whole play, so obviously there’s the two pairs of couples, and then there’s the fact that we’ve got it traverse so that the audience are looking back at each other.’ The traverse stage certainly gave an effective mirroring effect which resonated with the idea of our ability to look back at ourselves and assess our current state of mind. This is a key part of Prebble’s play, it is to re-think appearances and the way we view things, not only ourselves but also mental illness as a whole. Peter Chicken, who was lucky enough to see the National production told us how they had staged it; ‘They did it in the round, it was sort of on three tiers and it was pretty extraordinary.’ Indeed, whether traverse or in the round, the innovative staging was certainly apt for this extraordinary and original play which left the audience ruminating.