Lucy Prebble’s psychiatric drama hits the stage like a challenge. In Soutra Gilmour’s design, the floor, an LED video screen, is a clinical white walkway; the performers are caught in the glare of Jon Clark’s lighting. Two banks of spectators confront each other across the action.
Director Jamie Lloyd is a great energiser and clarifier: he springs the subject of a play into physical life. His drive created one of the best reimaginings of a classic text I have ever seen in Cyrano de Bergerac. It had diminishing results in Pinter’s The Homecoming, where subtext was drowned out by declaration. His production of The Effect is unfailingly exciting. Even when – a bass thrums intermittently like a growling heart – it keeps telling you it is exciting. Even when its oppositional arrangements seem to simplify the play’s arguments.
First staged in 2012, The Effect focuses on two volunteers – in this setting they sometimes look like lab animals – who take part in a drug trial of antidepressants. The two fall for each other: are their thrills chemically induced, or the consequence of finding each other? Is a condition made more “real” by its cause? Must depression be considered as a medical condition or is it a proportionate reaction to grim circumstances?
Prebble makes it clear that these are not absolute choices, and that conclusions might be thought of as interpretations, influenced by scientists’ own experiences. The man and woman conducting the trial have themselves had a love affair; one of them has also suffered depressive episodes. Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, in the least nuanced part of a ladykiller medic, radiates smugness; Michele Austin pulls off a rare, compelling mixture of penetration and distraction.
Taylor Russell makes a terrific theatrical debut in the part written for and first played by Billie Piper. Slightly prim, with a bunched-up energy, everything about her (she is a hyper-self-aware psychology student) is controlled: when she spins into dance she takes careful ballet steps. Alongside her, Paapa Essiedu – open, vulnerable – gives a career-lifting performance. He shifts shape as his emotional climate changes. Fluidly expressive as a breakdancer, he disintegrates in a flurry of ragged gestures: his body seems to fray.
Prebble, now celebrated for her television work on Succession and I Hate Suzie, has always galvanised big subjects in the theatre: financial machinations in Enron, Putin’s Russia in A Very Expensive Poison. Swept up by the vigour of her arguments in The Effect, I almost overlooked another talent: she continually, nonchalantly throws out resounding lines. “The history of medicine is the history of placebos”: an entire play could be built around that thought alone.
The Finborough is chipping away at theatrical history, bringing the work of forgotten dramatists to its stage, filling the Earl’s Court air with early-20th-century voices and with tales of button-booted women battling for sexual and financial freedom.
Six years ago Melissa Dunne startled me with her direction of Cicely Hamilton’s Just to Get Married (1911). Now – under the title Makeshifts and Realities – she stages a triple bill of one-act dramas first performed just before the first world war. The evening does not live up to all its promises: the action moves at too deliberate a pace for the rapid incisiveness of these short episodes; the more preposterous male characters engulf the pocket-sized space. Yet the sense of forgotten life captured on the wing is fascinating.
HM Harwood’s Honour Thy Father is a sensationally turned scene. A prosperous young woman (Poppy Allen-Quarmby glints in black and white with lace trim and beady eyes) is exposed as making her living as a sex worker, but in a Shavian twist exposes her shocked father as her inferior, a bully who can’t maintain his family. Harwood, a surgeon turned journalist married to F Tennyson Jesse (of A Pin to See the Peepshow), wrote the screenplay for Garbo’s Queen Christina, but went back to his mill-owning roots when his success waned.
Gertrude Robins was also once celebrated. An early pilot who studied at Oxford but was, being female, not granted a degree, she had her work produced at Manchester’s Gaiety theatre by Annie Horniman, who encouraged plays by women. Robins’s two back-to-back playlets, Makeshifts and Realities, are quietly telling. In a genteel room – finely conjured in Alex Marker’s stove-and-sepia, clock-and-candlesticks design – two sisters wait for release from domestic and schoolroom serfdom. One has her nose in a book; the other is darning: Philippa Quinn draws on the coltish grace she showed at her debut in Dunne’s Just to Get Married, looking always on the brink of a blush. They greet news of suffragettes cautiously, regarding a husband as their main hope of escape: “What a firm knock he has,” one of them thrills, when a chap comes to the door. They compromise, but the outcome is subtly unexpected. Well – the old slang rattles away as if new minted – I’ll be jiggered.
Another pub stage, the King’s Head in Islington, last week called time after 53 years, as it prepares to move to a custom-built theatre. It waved goodbye with The Curtain Call, a cabaret that showed its extraordinary range. Freddie Love performed Habanera in red latex; Janet Suzman read from Athol Fugard; Mark Gatiss gleamed in The Boys in the Band. And there were fond memories of what now seems unimaginable: lunchtime theatre shows.
Star ratings (out of five)
The Effect ★★★★
Makeshifts and Realities ★★★
