I don’t want to reason with you. I want to know, right now, in this moment, what you feel.

Clinical experiment gone wrong or passionate love story? Can we even spot the difference?

Tristan and Connie are volunteers in a drug trial which goes wildly off track as they start to feel the intense pull of attraction.

Monitored by two supervising doctors with a past, Tristan and Connie become less rational as the experiment progresses succumbing to wild bouts of euphoria, sexual ecstasy and paranoid depression.

The Effect is an investigation of the brain and the chemistry of mood in a moving, darkly comic play exploring mental health, neurology and the limits of medicine, alongside ideas of fate, loyalty, identity and love.

End experiment.

By Lucy Prebble

• Directed by Gari Jones
• Designed by Pip Beattie