DOPAMINE , DRUGS, DANGER, DOCTORS
This intriguing play by Lucy Prebble aired in 2012 in the intimate Cottesloe space , with Billie Piper and Jonjo o’Neill as paid subjects in an antidepressant drug trial. They are falling in love – or are they? Are their elevated moods and dopamine surge just the effects of psychopharmacology, a neural trick played on the “three pounds of jelly” that is the human brain and hence the whole of human identity?
Great topic to come back to, after a decade in which national obsession with mental health and emotional hygiene became increasingly heightened even before the lockdowns sent us all a bit nuts. It’s just the play to meet our boom in media-friendy selfdiagnosis, mental-misery memoirs and GPs badgered to prescribe for everything from anxiety to grief. It’s a sharp moment when Prebble’s grumpier woman psychiatrist challenges her boss with the possibility that we will look back at the whole concept of happiness as ‘chemical balance’ like a modern version of the medieval “four humours”.
It’s packing them in, and rightly: Pebble’s text emerges revived and sharpened in a big space , directed by Jamie Lloyd with high tech non-naturalism (no props, even when mentioned). On a transverse lighted runway of a stage, book-ended by the two psychiatrists, the young people are questioned, instructed and set going with the first doses. Papa Essiedu’s Tristan is cheeky, street-smart, funny (irresistible, indeed) . Taylor Russell – in a remarkable stage debut – is Connie, at first a rather irritating know-it-all psychology PhD student. There’s a lovely moment when, all for medicalisation of mood and personality, she assumes nobody believes in God any more , and discovers to her social horror that Tristan sort of does.
Roaming the stage around one another, teasing, comparing notes on the dreams the drug gives them, briefly escaping against the rules to lark in an asylum courtyard, they move towards a mutual adoring fascination . It culminates in wonderful, laughing, childlike romping. I remember the earlier production as far more obviously sexy: this is infinitely more endearing, silly gymnastics in their hospital tracksuits as she loosens her prim middle-class academic persona to meet Essiedu’s wild happy laughing joy.
No spoilers, it’s a curiously intense, hypnotic 100-minutes (Jon Clark’s LED set has much to do with that). but the plot has several sharp twists, because trials have a placebo element and psychiatrists too can lie. Dr Toby (a soft voiced rather sinister Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) and Dr Lorna have their own journey through truth and emotion to complete: Michele Austin’s Lorna is the warmer and more drily funny figure but also – it is wrenchingly done – a victim of both dangerously depressive episodes, and of love.
nationaltheatre.org.uk. to 7 October
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