The Effect: “Calcraft’s Production is empathetically directed and sensitively staged”

If the measure of contemporary, student theatre is its capacity to capture human relationships in miniaturist, high-fidelity emotional detail, Maya Calcraft’s empathetically directed and sensitively staged production of Lucy Prebble’s The Effect is the ideal. Working within the spatial constraints of the intimate Corpus Playroom, Calcraft, her assistant director Daphne Starvide, and her cast have succeeded in throwing into relief the subtleties of Prebble’s dialogue to great effect, making for a deeply funny, emotionally affecting playgoing experience. 

Prebble’s play is, in many ways an excellent choice for the intimate space of the Corpus. It features a small, entangled cast of four characters, two of whom are university-aged, placed into an unnaturally constrained physical space. The plot follows two psychiatrists, Toby and Lorna, portrayed by Jake Leigh and Audrey Hammer, and two participants in the medical clinical trial they are conducting, Connie and Tristan, played by Olivia Khattar and Rafael Griso Dryer. The troubled clinical trial is meant to examine the effects of a new antidepressant medication. As the clinical trial progresses, Connie and Tristan develop an intense romantic relationship, which both they and their medical overseers struggle to separate from the effects of psychoactive medication. Meanwhile, Toby, a well-known researcher, revisits his relationship with Lorna, his younger colleague and former lover, whose struggles with depression form a significant emotional counterweight to Connie and Tristan’s romance. While Prebble’s talent for plotting is obvious, her most undeniable achievement is in the highly naturalistic, colloquial dialogue she has given her characters, which makes the play feel both real and immediate, even after disastrous errors in the conduct of the drug trial begin to occur, which we as the audience understand would have halted the study completely in the real world. 

Calcraft uses the claustrophobic, inter-character intensity of Prebble’s writing to great effect, directing the actors to not only speak, but move in ways which bring out the best in one another’s performances. Introducing Connie and Tristan, Calcraft places them against the two back walls of the square playroom, with Tristan moving forwards and away from his wall and towards the audience and Connie. This blocking decision allows for their first awkward dialogue centred on the collection of urine samples for drug testing to establish the dynamic of Connie’s cautiousness and reserve and Tristan’s more outgoing, risk-taking behaviours visually, as well as through the actor’s performances. The set design is similarly excellent, working with, rather than against the constraints of the stage. Many student productions in the Corpus Playroom struggle with what is a relatively confined space, attempting to cram in too large a story or too many characters. In The Effect’s case, however, the playroom’s inherent claustrophobia and intimate qualities accentuate the entangled emotional experience of the characters and the strangeness of the prison-like clinical trial environment. Calcraft’s production likewise uses medical language to separate the play into blocks. Each scene begins with a light-projection against the set, explaining where in the experiment we are and what dosage of medication the characters are about to receive. This trick of set-design and lighting, courtesy of lighting designer Jasper Harris, captures both the light-on-shadow intensity of many of the character’s interactions and the broader context of medical observation, around which much of the script’s conflict evolves. Sound designer Tom Barry is similarly attuned to the structure of the play’s scenes, avoiding extraneous sounds in favour of mechanical clips which bookend each scene and recall the sound of a locking hospital door. 

Calcraft’s approach casts into relief Prebble’s themes of medicalisation, materialist determinism, and the ambiguous ethics of relationships, driving the production towards an emotional crescendo.  

But a play is only as good as its players, and the four actors inhabit their characters with gusto. From their first appearance together in the play’s first scene, Khattar and Griso Dryer play well off one another to create the awkward tension of early romantic attraction. Prebble’s writing, which presents the university educated Connie and the relative outsider Tristan in very distinct terms is made believable by the obvious chemistry between the two actors, which allows for both the space for emotionally compelling onstage interactions and excellent comic timing. Khattar’s subtle suggestions of Connie’s depressive personality and personal, emotional difficulties are a particular highlight, meshing well into themes of mental health, questions of medical ethics, and the meaning of diagnosis which run through the script. Griso Dryer likewise, brings out latent insecurities in Tristan’s character, which, though present in Prebble’s script, require an actor attuned to the masks of carefree masculinity and emotional vulnerability in Tristan’s character. 

It is difficult to overstate how carefully Calcraft’s direction renders Prebble’s dialogue and Khatter and Griso’s performances. Khattar and Griso Dyer’s ability to play off  one another, and especially their excellent comic timing, make the rapid development of Connie and Tristan’s relationship emotionally available to the audience. Much of Prebble’s dialogue, if delivered incorrectly, could land as contrived or even creepy in some of Tristan’s earlier scenes, and it is Khattar’s reactions to Griso Dyer’s charismatic delivery which makes the character and the relationship compelling and believable.  

For me, however, the emotional core of the play was Hammer’s tragically sensitive portrayal of Lorna. Lorna’s relationship with Toby injects the play with questions of medical and personal ethics, as Toby, a doctor known for cheating on his wife with younger colleagues, finds himself interacting with Lorna, years after their affair. Lorna, herself given to episodes of severe depression becomes increasingly frustrated with both Toby’s decision-making in the trial and his own convictions about how to medicate mental illness.  

Hammer’s acting alternates between subdued detachment and a frustrated, despairing intensity which her character is clearly trying to hold back, culminating in a hypnotically delivered inner conversation between Lorna’s rational mind and depressive thoughts. For the role to work, the actor must imbue it with a sense of exhausted intensity , and Hammer succeeds in spades. Leigh’s humorously arrogant portrayal of the deeply flawed Toby, whose beliefs about the fundamental chemical predictability of the human mind are introduced as he glibly presents the audience with his own father’s dissected brain in a box, provides a counterpoint to the personally fraught Lorna. As the play progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that his and Lorna’s relationship was fundamentally shaped by Lorna’s depression and their differences of belief about the nature of the human mind and emotions. The ultimate failure of the clinical trial, focused on Toby’s new drug, is bound up in the failure of their relationship. Leigh’s relatively subdued emotional palette matches Hammer’s sensitive depiction of her character’s depression and provides emotional cement for the play’s two intersecting plot lines. 

Calcraft’s direction, the cast’s excellent acting, and the crew’s tightly coordinated production proves that in the hands of a good director and possessed of a good script, student theatre can be as good as any professional production.