Love is the drug in Lucy Prebble’s sad, thoughtful drama. Or is it vice versa? Tristan (a livewire Paapa Essiedu and Connie (Taylor Russell, the Canadian star of Bones and All, quietly mesmerising in her stage debut) fall in love while undergoing a clinical test for a new antidepressant. Their feelings could be real or a side-effect.
A play of ideas about the way our brains work is welded to a ruthless 100-minute emotional arc, laced with wit and given a bittersweet ending. It receives a typically stark, urgent production from Jamie Lloyd which left me impressed and stimulated but also weirdly flat.
Prebble, more recently a writer on Succession, wrote the play for her muse and creative collaborator Billie Piper in 2013 and it was mounted in the National’s intimate Cottesloe (now the Dorfman). The script has been tweaked to accommodate Russell’s Canadian-ness and the fact that the characters are all Black, this time round.
Lloyd and designer Soutra Gilmour splay the action open. Essiedu and Russell, in grey sweatsuits, circle each other on a brightly-lit monochrome corridor between two steep banks of audience seating. Beady doctors sit at either end. A human brain in a bucket is the only prop.
Somehow, the agonised collapse of Essiedu’s cocksure Hackney boy Tris and the muted anguish of Russell’s psychology student Connie seem like equal acts of exposure. Watching it feels voyeuristic but Prebble isn’t only interested in love, and only abstractedly in sex. She ponders medical ethics, and why we trust external chemicals rather than the reactions of our own fickle brains. Might depression be a logical reaction to life rather than an illness?
These wider ideas are mostly explored through the medics, whose relationship feels schematic. Michele Austin’s witheringly acid Dr Lorna is prone to depression and had an unwise fling with Kobna Holdbook-Smith’s Dr Toby, the creator of the drug on test. A man so purringly self-satisfied he’d lick himself if he could, he’s the least plausible character. Moral dilemmas seem to turn up right on cue.
Austin and Holdbrook-Smith still manage to give fine, funny performances, and the two leads are terrific. The mercurial Essiedu creates a loose, lairy physicality unlike anything else I’ve seen him do. He’s absolutely matched by Russell, whose understated self-possession is riveting. The short scenes where Connie and Tris explore the mystery and delirium of early romance are lovely.
These days Lloyd usually boils plays down to their thrilling essence: this production feels like a throwback to earlier times when he blew them up. It’s still striking, and I still think he’s the most exciting director working today. Can we now see his Doll’s House with Jessica Chastain, which London cruelly lost to New York thanks to Covid, please?
Until 7 Oct, nationaltheatre.org.uk
