← Back to portfolio
"The Effect" at the Cottesloe
Published on 3rd September 2013
It would have been difficult for Rupert Goold to find a less challenging audience for his new collaboration with Lucy Prebble than me. Although I stopped short of taking along a sign reading “Marry Me Rupert” to the pre-performance Q&A, (as luck would have it, he is also rather dishy), I did take a healthy dose of critical prejudice into the Cottesloe with me. The synthesis of Prebble’s intellectually effervescent writing and Goold’s sublime dramatic aesthetic had been explosive with ENRON, and I reckoned it would survive into this pared-down, four-hander “clinical romance”, set in a pharmaceutical trial. As Jez Butterworth’s The River was to Jerusalem, so The Effect is to ENRON - stripped down, desperate to avoid post-hit stagnation, and met with hysterical anticipation. It was as good as I had suspected, but not in the same way. Goold was nowhere - aside from some desultory projection work, gimmicky “patient” wristbands handed out to the audience, and the redundant device of bringing us into Miriam Buether’s swish clinical set design, his hallmarks of dynamism and razzamatazz were notably absent. The text, on the other hand, at its best, was a masterpiece. A whistle-stop tour of true love vs. dopamine, the brain vs. the self, psychology vs. psychiatry, and what it means to be “sane”, it is as packed with ideas as it sounds. Whilst this often meant a tendency towards a broad brush, it also produced mesmerising set-piece monologues. Tom Goodman-Hill’s captivating pharmaceutical sales-pitch, involving clutching the brain of his dead father in a Yorick-style grasp, was worthy of the Shakespearean comparison it invited. This is, in fact, a play that darts from allusion to allusion like a cerebral spark through a network of literary neurons - Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis percolates through Anastasia Hille’s soliloquy as a clinically depressed doctor, and Beckett meets biology in a beautiful, and deeply moving, little sequence involving transient global amnesia. Billie Piper was seriously strong in the lead role, although she’ll find it difficult to maintain for the whole run the level of emotional investment that left her weeping at the curtain-call. Opposite her, as randy, riotous fellow-volunteer, was Jonjo O’Neill, staying just on the right side of irritating as he built up heart-rending chemistry with Piper. It was in the dialogues, though, that Goold’s directorial instinct crept back to the fore. Despite magisterially rejecting “any dramatic methodology, really”, the key debate scenes of the play are a masterclass in naturalistic directorial choreography. He directs Prebble’s text in the same way as he would direct Racine, and the results are exquisite - bilateral symmetries are created and broken, movement patterns build up and collapse - combined with some ethereal movement sequences, it was almost enough to forgive him for the silly wristbands. Yes, it was a little over-long, and yes, there may have been the odd extraneous hand-job scene here and there, but what aspiring fashionable playwright in the 21st century doesn’t have those problems? When she sorts them out, Prebble is set to be a seriously important writer.
