Building from the story of a clinical drug trial gone wildly wrong, Lucy Prebble’s chemical romance The Effect is an investigation of the brain and the chemistry of mood. With her four characters—two participating in a clinical trial and two supervising doctors with a past together—and using all the tools at her theatrical disposal, Prebble is aiming to create, “what love feels like…and what depression feels like.” Read Lucy Prebble’s interview with Fiona Gruber, arts writer for The Guardian, as the Melbourne Theatre Company prepared for their 2014 production of The Effect.
How did you go about constructing this play?
It began with two elements, in my mind. One of which was that the setting and location of a drugs trial is inherently theatrical because it takes place in one location over a set period of time; it fulfills a sense of Aristotelian unity.
The other was much more emotional and personal, and it was to do with the feeling I wanted to create, to do with what love feels like, and equally on the other side, what depression feels like. In some way, they are oppositional to each other.
And it felt to me that this has some scientific basis, even though that’s an artistic, emotional idea, because the neurotransmitters of the brain, which are acted on in antidepressants are the same as the neurotransmitters that are acted on when you fall in love.
I was very interested in seeing if it was possible to create a feeling of love on stage and also a feeling of depression and explore how real or not these things are. Because if you have two actors on stage who are kissing each other, touching each other’s eyes and expressing extreme affection, we know they’re actors and they’re actually doing those things. We know, both from personal experience and scientific studies, that actually doing those things provokes feelings of affection and love for each other.
It’s possible you can create love that way. People can feel in the audience that happening.
Let’s talk about the real-life drug trial that inspired this play.
I remember clearly the reporting around a set of drug trials that went very wrong. Only because it wasn’t something I’d ever really heard of before. That piqued my interest, because there was a lot of reporting about how horrific the injuries were of the people who were taking part in the trial, so it ran on quite a lot of front pages.
I remember thinking, “Gosh what is that world? What’s there?”
You went on a drug trial.
I did go on a drugs trial. It was designed to be immunity boosting. Someone said to me when I was there that the difficult thing isn’t being given a drug, it’s living in an environment that’s that small for that period of time. Many drugs trials are weeks long.
At the beginning of the play the main characters sign consent forms. How can you consent to something when you don’t really know what’s going to happen. Even the doctors don’t know.
What’s of interest to me is the amount we put ourselves at risk emotionally and therefore also physically—because there isn’t really a divide between the emotional and the physical—when we love other people. Obviously at the heart of the play is a conversation about how we effect each other. That’s of interest to me is the amount we put ourselves at risk emotionally and therefore also physically—because there isn’t really a divide between the emotional and the physical—when we love other people. Obviously at the heart of the play is a conversation about how we effect each other.