This article was taken from the November 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Love has thrown protagonists together and torn them apart on stage for centuries. Can serotonin and dopamine do the same? The Effect, by Lucy Prebble, the 31-year-old writer of corporate-finance drama Enron, is about romance in a clinical drugs trial. Set in a testing centre, it asks whether the couple's feelings are real or side effects of the anti-depressant they are taking.
Headlines about the consequences of a drugs trial at a private research unit at Northwick Park Hospital in 2006, in which six volunteers suffered multiple organ failure, piqued Prebble's interest. "I thought it would be interesting to write about love in that environment and dissect it properly -- what it is biologically and chemically, and what implications that has for what it is socially," she says. Prebble's research included interviewing neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, who specialises in social cognitive processes, and even participating in a drugs trial herself. In a "gleaming" centre in Croydon, she gave herself up to days of testing to ensure her play is accurate. "A friend warned me that the subject amounts to 21st-century blasphemy," she laughs. '''You can't go on stage and say love doesn't exist. That's all people have left.'"
The Effect runs from November 6 at the National Theatre, London. nationaltheatre.org.uk
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
