Review Roundup: What Did The Critics Think of THE EFFECT, Starring Paapa Essiedu and Taylor Russell?

Lucy Prebble’s critically acclaimed play has returned to The National Theatre in a bold new production directed by Jamie Lloyd.

Paapa Essiedu is joined by Taylor Russell in this funny and intimate examination of love and ethics. As two young volunteers in a clinical drug trial, their illicit romance poses startling dilemmas for the supervising doctors.

What did the critics think of the revival?

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Alexander Cohen, BroadwayWorld: Directorial sharpness strikes hard and fast, announcing itself like a syringe jabbed into your veins. A metallic soundtrack accentuates the drama’s rhythmic punchiness. The conceptually meaty questions, that have kept philosophers awake at night since Plato, are kept easily digestible across the near two hour run time.

Sarah Crompton: WhatsOnStage: Prebble has subtly updated the play to address issues of race and the power of Big Pharma to condition the conversations around depression. In one devastating exchange between the two supervising doctors, who have a tangled history to resolve, Toby asks whether Lorna’s objection to antidepressants is a political act. “I’m a working-class Black woman,” she shoots back. “Getting out of bed is a political act.”

Sam Marlowe: The Stage: The preoccupation here is nothing less existentially weighty than free will and the human condition, yet both play and production are as effortlessly deft as they are astute. It’s the kind of theatre that lives with you, turning over in the mind long after the experiment ends.

Claire Alfree: The Telegraph: The Effect’s themes are the same as those that obsessed the ancient Greeks: the nature of free will and reality; the impact of chemicals on the brain as explored by Plato in his Symposium. Prebble – whose ear for whip smart dialogue easily predates Succession - dramatises these questions within the intimate form of a diagrammatic chamber piece that in Lloyd’s production is both dystopian horror story and lucid ethical debate. 

Clive Davis: The Times: Russell, making her professional stage debut, grows in stature as the 100-minute piece unfolds. Essiedu’s wide-boy is a trickier proposition. Frankly, his chat-up lines are so cheesy and his charms so limited that it’s hard to believe that Connie would take an interest in him, even if she were drugged to the eyeballs.

The Effect is at The National Theatre until 7 October

Photo Credit: Marc Brenner

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