Arts:Blog

Theatre Review: The Effect ***

Michael Cox reviews a production with a terrific cast that's held back by a rambling script.

There’s much to admire in Firebrand’s latest production: The Effect. The cast of four are equally terrific, director Richard Baron’s staging is slick and consistently interesting and the design work is impressive.

So why does it feel a bit underwhelming?

That might be down to Lucy Prebble’s script. The play itself is teeming with excellent questions: What is love, and can it be chemically manipulated? What is the responsibility that pharmaceutical companies have with their products, and how much free reign should they have in clinical tests? Can relationships be fostered through scientific advancement?

All intriguing questions worthy of dramatic examination, but therein lies the problem: Prebble’s script is mostly clinical, happy asking questions and probing scenarios but hardly willing to come up with any answers. This in and of itself might be perfectly fine for a shorter play, but for a full-length piece that clocks in at over two hours, the production feels like a dragged out political debate peppered with zingers rather than intelligent, engaging drama.

That isn’t to say there isn’t much to enjoy: there is—primarily with its cast. Pauline Knowles and Jonathan Coote are both superb as medical professionals with history together, and Scarlett Mack and Cameron Crighton make for an appealing couple—easy to feel empathy with even if their characters are mostly skin-deep. The interplay that these four actors have with each other is engaging and throws up interesting situations, situations that could have easily run out of steam had the performers not been nearly as committed as they are. And performed on a platform that whizzes and lights up while two screens throw about multimedia images, the production is consistently intriguing to watch.

But it still comes down to the rambling script. Perhaps with a shorter running time The Effect would hit more emotional buttons, but as it is the production occasionally crackles to life when it should shine bright.

The Effect tours until March 14.