DOPAMINE , DRUGS, DANGER, DOCTORS
This intriguing play by Lucy Prebble aired in 2012 within the intimate Cottesloe house , with Billie Piper and Jonjo o’Neill as paid topics in an antidepressant drug trial. They are falling in love – or are they? Are their elevated moods and dopamine surge simply the consequences of psychopharmacology, a neural trick performed on the “three pounds of jelly” that’s the human mind and therefore the entire of human identification?
Great subject to come back again to, after a decade through which nationwide obsession with psychological well being and emotional hygiene turned more and more heightened even earlier than the lockdowns despatched us all a bit nuts. It’s simply the play to satisfy our increase in media-friendy selfdiagnosis, mental-misery memoirs and GPs badgered to prescribe for all the things from anxiousness to grief. It’s a pointy second when Prebble’s grumpier lady psychiatrist challenges her boss with the chance that we’ll look again on the entire idea of happiness as ‘chemical steadiness’ like a contemporary model of the medieval “four humours”.
It’s packing them in, and rightly: Pebble’s textual content emerges revived and sharpened in a giant house , directed by Jamie Lloyd with excessive tech non-naturalism (no props, even when talked about). On a transverse lighted runway of a stage, book-ended by the 2 psychiatrists, the younger individuals are questioned, instructed and set going with the primary doses. Papa Essiedu’s Tristan is cheeky, street-smart, humorous (irresistible, certainly) . Taylor Russell – in a outstanding stage debut – is Connie, at first a reasonably irritating know-it-all psychology PhD scholar. There’s a beautiful second when, all for medicalisation of temper and persona, she assumes no person believes in God any extra , and discovers to her social horror that Tristan type of does.
Roaming the stage round each other, teasing, evaluating notes on the desires the drug provides them, briefly escaping towards the foundations to lark in an asylum courtyard, they transfer in direction of a mutual adoring fascination . It culminates in fantastic, laughing, childlike romping. I bear in mind the sooner manufacturing as way more clearly attractive: that is infinitely extra endearing, foolish gymnastics of their hospital tracksuits as she loosens her prim middle-class educational persona to satisfy Essiedu’s wild completely satisfied laughing pleasure.
No spoilers, it’s a curiously intense, hypnotic 100-minutes (Jon Clark’s LED set has a lot to do with that). however the plot has a number of sharp twists, as a result of trials have a placebo ingredient and psychiatrists can also lie. Dr Toby (a mushy voiced reasonably sinister Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) and Dr Lorna have their very own journey via fact and emotion to finish: Michele Austin’s Lorna is the hotter and extra drily humorous determine but additionally – it’s wrenchingly accomplished – a sufferer of each dangerously depressive episodes, and of affection.
nationaltheatre.org.uk. to 7 October
