(Michael Billington’s article appeared in the Guardian, 11/15.)
How do you follow a big hit? Just as Jez Butterworth succeeded Jerusalem with the more modest The River, so Lucy Prebble follows her spectacular Enron with an intimate four-hander that examines love, depression and the limitations of neuroscience. It's an absorbing, if slightly diagrammatic, drama immaculately directed by Rupert Goold in a joint production between Headlong and the National Theatre.
Prebble's setting is a posh clinic where paid volunteers take part in pharmaceutical drug trials. We meet two of the guinea pigs: Tristan, a boisterously flirty Ulsterman, and Connie, a bright psychology
student.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/nov/14/the-effect-lucy-prebble-review