It’s love, ethics and neuroscience in Lucy Prebble’s high-voltage psychological drama The Effect, presented by Theatre Works until Saturday 18 April. Reviewer Olivia Di Grazia grapples with the side-effects of the staging.
It’s not real love, Connie insists, pacing back and forth, itching from within. She’s a psychology student, after all; she should know. Tristan – wired and flustered, dopamine flooding his system – counters her half-hearted argument: “Can we tell the difference between a side effect and who we are?”
It’s love, ethics and neuroscience in Lucy Prebble’s high-voltage psychological drama The Effect, presented by Theatre Works and Key Conspirators as part of the former’s diverse 2026 season. The Effect follows two young volunteers as they enter a four-week clinical drug trial, succumbing to a chemically-induced whirlwind of attraction and infatuation that threatens the very foundation of the trial itself. Lightly recontextualised for the Australian stage, this sleek and stylish interpretation of Prebble’s surgically-sharp script promises a night of strikingly sensorial, thought-provoking theatre, even as it fails to fully embody the cerebral and emotional complexity of its material.
While the stage at first appears to be composed simply of two black rectangular boxes, six vertical poles and a horizontal beam of light that cuts across them, the play’s opening reveals something more interesting: a clinical terrarium. A stark white, sanitized room, its left side mirrors the right perfectly, right down to the single decorative plant that cuts through the white, gesturing towards life that’s otherwise absent. Behind the glass of this mini-ecosystem is Dr. Lorna James (Emma Choy) – the psychologist overseeing the trial – and the two volunteers, Connie (Jessica Martin) and Tristan (Damon Baudin), who are being read a series of introductory survey questions. As the patients begin the experiment, emerging from the contained terrarium to the free space in front of it, Dr. James remains within, observing and recording from behind the divide. This already intriguing staging conceit is made even more so when the structure is revealed to be two-tiered – the upper half a simple black contrast to the bottom’s white severity – providing another vantage point for the doctors to observe and converse in their own right.
This visual ingenuity, though, also inadvertently serves as one of the play’s drawbacks. While Tom Vulcan’s set boldly positions the audience within the same detached “objectivity” as the doctors, frequently containing the characters behind glass and thus rendering us witnesses to the experiment ourselves, there is a level of intimacy and immersion obscured by this configuration. This forced distance, though dramaturgically sound, ultimately inhibits the emotional investment on which the play depends, making it difficult to connect with the characters. But importantly, this distance isn’t just physical; it bleeds into the marrow of the piece itself. Even when, for pivotal scenes, the characters emerge from behind this divide, an intangible barrier remains, rendering them emotionally inaccessible even at their most vulnerable.
Director Alonso Pineda’s vision for The Effect clearly aims to conjure a heightened sense of unreality – one that captures the complexity of brain chemistry under the influence and the limitations of medicine to distil the human experience – and, for the most part, it succeeds. The atmosphere is striking, evoking a sterile nightclub with its thunderous, thumping music and frenetic flashes of light like neural pathways ablaze. Vulcan’s lighting and vision design is perhaps the play’s most valuable asset, working in tandem with Jack Burmeister’s compositions and sound design to not just convey the effects of the chemicals coursing through Connie and Tristan’s systems but embody them. The contrast between their intense somatic experience and their clinical surroundings – soundtracked by quiet yet incessant beeping to ground us back in reality – is executed with impressive control. Where the production falters, however, is in the believability of its relationships.
While each of the four performers is convincing and committed in their respective portrayals, the interpersonal dynamics between the central pairings never feel fully realised, instead teetering on the edge of immersion. In turn, the increasingly high stakes are never fully felt, even as the staging tries – to varying degrees of success – to feel it for you. Jessica Martin’s Connie is an everywoman of sorts: an amalgam of confidence, insecurity and neuroticism; the kind of woman who prioritises her head over her heart, believing logic to be more valuable than feeling. Damon Baudin’s spontaneous, free-spirited Tristan is her foil.
While both actors do an impeccable job with their physicality – speech accelerating, bodies growing agitated, feelings becoming uncontainable as the doses increase and their attraction intensifies – their connection feels more implied than viscerally experienced. Though chemically understandable, their constant movement and fidgeting are ultimately a distraction from the dialogue, which already hurtles at breakneck speed. Without moments of stillness or tension to balance the intensity, the romance feels chemical rather than natural, lessening the impact of their deliberately blurred “reality vs drug” storyline.
Connie and Tristan’s relationship runs parallel to that of Dr. James and Dr. Toby Sealey, both of whom oversee the trial and share a complicated relationship that extends beyond the professional. Philip Hayden’s Dr. Sealey – touting a so-called “psychopharmacological revolution” with the vigour of an evangelical preacher – is the most one-dimensional character on paper. Yet, Hayden manages to render this controlling, condescending psychiatrist with just enough humanity to ground him in the real world. The true humanity of the piece, though, shines through in Choy’s anxious, deeply compassionate Dr. James. We witness her progression from a highly structured, analytical doctor with a mere whisper of an interior life to a troubled, three-dimensional woman on the verge of mental collapse.
Given the play’s aesthetic intensity, the choice to let Dr. James’ heart-wrenching monologue near the play’s conclusion stand on its own – delivered in pure silence with no lights to distract, only stillness – was a powerful one. As Choy spirals, sitting on the floor all alone, brain in hand, we see a window into the true precarity of the human mind, the complexity of mental illness that clinical trials and medicine at large cannot possibly contain. In this moment of stark restraint, The Effect finds the emotional clarity that much of the production otherwise struggles to sustain.
