The Effect – Sydney Theatre Company and Queensland Theatre Company

Overview

The Effect is a romantic comedy about a boy and a girl with instant chemistry. That sentence is true, but The Effect is also a contemporary 'issue play', where the boy and girl's bodily chemistry is being experimented on, and the very nature of our knowledge about mental health is under the microscope.

From Lucy Prebble (the UK writer behind Enron and TV's Secret Diary of a Call Girl), the clever, warm and hyper-relevant play is a response to something her country and ours have in common: the rise of psychotropic medications. Antidepressant use has risen by about 10 percent per year since 1998, the program tells us, when not only is it still a fairly fledgling science but the self-interest of big pharmaceutical companies is skewing our progress in the field.

The arguments are fought overtly by the conflicted Dr James (Angie Milliken) and her supervisor, Toby (Eugene Gilfedder), who are conducting a drug trial in which subjects are given increasing dosages over several weeks. It's there that buttoned-up psychology student Connie (Anna McGahan) meets scruffy free spirit Tristan (Mark Leonard Winter from Thyestes), while each is holding their pee cups — a meet-cute if ever there was one.

Their attraction grows with each passing day in the isolated facility, but Connie resists. Not only is sexual contact verboten during the trial, she's worried it's the mood-elevating drug that's causing the flirtation, not their real feelings. Dr James isn't happy either; she's worried it's the flirtation that's elevating the duo's moods, not the drug she's testing.

Props to Prebble — where this tangled web leads after intermission is completely unpredictable. Like that ex you're hung up on, this script is charming, funny and ultimately a heartbreaker. Prebble does great work in a fairly unforgiving style of drama that can so easily get didactic or contrived. And while the false dichotomy set up between the positions of Dr James and Toby can be frustrating, it's also eye-opening. Did you know 'chemical imbalance' is just one, contested hypothesis about the cause of mental illness? That's a pretty important bit of knowledge I owe to Prebble's Dr James, who thinks it'll be the 20th century's four humors.

Director Sarah Goodes has put on a clear and energising staging here, bringing out four completely seductive performances from the actors. It's pretty easy to fall in love with both McGahan as Connie and Winter as Tristan (a key factor missing from so many rom-coms). The set — a clinical, reflective room positioned around a giant lightbox by designer Renee Mulder — is an appropriate space said to be inspired by the work of optical trickster Olafur Eliasson. It only seems to get the chance to fulfill this ambition on a couple of occasions, however, and also plays its part in some less-than-smooth transitions.

On top of its generally good execution, The Effect is just a great piece of programming. It's the sort of theatre that can speak to a wide audience, about an issue that's touched nearly everyone. Also, and there's never an appropriate place to say this but: the STC programs are the very best around. This one includes a glossary, a contemporary Australian love poem and a medical history essay by science journalist Wendy Zukerman — all wonderfully interesting. Get one when you go.