powerless nonadjacent: How do you know you're really in love?

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

How do you know you're really in love?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury, editor

(Image: Ellie Kurtz)

Connie and Tristan are participants in the first human trial of a new anti-depressant drug. Confined to a research lab, they soon find themselves falling for each other. But as their moods soar, how can they be sure their romantic chemistry isn?t simply the result of their altered brain chemistry? And how would it matter if it was?

In The Effect, British playwright Lucy Prebble?s first stage production since Enron, Connie, initially the more rational and introspective of the pair, finds herself driven to distraction by the thought that her feelings might not be real. Tristan, more impulsive and accepting, is happy to take it as it comes - regardless of whatever ?it? may actually be. But perhaps their attitudes are being shaped by the drugs as well... The audience is kept guessing - and whatever expectations we form are repeatedly confounded as the experiment unfolds.

The play explores a long-standing question: what is the relationship between our corporeal existence and our psychological selves? Technology has allowed us to examine our brains more closely than ever before - but how our neural activity assembles our mental states (or vice versa) remains deeply mysterious. Those who boldly assert otherwise are skewered in an acerbic programme note by journalist Steven Poole - but Prebble?s script is less polemical, and thus more intriguing, than Poole?s primer on ?neurobollocks? might suggest.

It does, however, warn repeatedly (and powerfully) of the dangers inherent in unpicking the intricate processes by which we form our identities and relationships. Lorna, the psychiatrist overseeing the trial, asserts that a ?normal? mind is one that continually fools itself into thinking things are better than they really are. Forced objectivity - whether conferred by experiment, medication or malaise - removes that capacity for self-delusion. That, the play suggests, leads to self-doubt and self-destruction. Human kind cannot bear very much reality, as TS Eliot wrote.

Prebble?s script gives plenty of time to competing views on the utility of reductionism, the medicalisation of mental states, and the internal and external views of mental illness. (Too much time, in fact: the play?s sparkling first act gives way to?over-long?Socratic dialogues in the second.) But the abiding impression is that any attempt to turn emotional states into the objects of study is doomed to unravel. In the end, the heart wants what it wants.

So is The Effect an anti-scientific play? It?s certainly not a play in which science is portrayed flatteringly. While its tagline reads ?Love is double blind?, the clinical trial it depicts is anything but: most of the damage is done by the leaking of information that ought to remain confidential. The trial is an unethical shambles, but it?s not as if that?s without precedent, and the self-serving, self-justifying altruism of its TED-wannabe backer has its parallels in the real world too.

(Image:Ellie Kurtz)

This makes for good, at times excellent, drama, but the scenario is too heavily fictionalised to provide a truly meaningful critique of how neuroscience is practiced or what it seeks to achieve. The Effect could just as well be read as a cautionary tale about the importance of ethical standards, clinical detachment and judiciously duplicitous experimental design. Messing with peoples? heads is a dangerous business, but you don?t need the props of neuroscience to explore that: fairy enchantment is just as effective an excuse for amour fou as mood-altering chemicals.

The play is at its best when its superbly-realised cast of characters are illustrating, rather than arguing, the difficulties of reconciling what we ?know? from personal experience with what we ?know? from physiological or psychological experiment. The bravura performances, pithy dialogue and creative staging of this production make for a compelling and often delightful first half; the ending takes too long to arrive, but is heart-stopping when it does.

And while The Effect is very much of its moment, the questions it raises will be relevant for a long time to come. As the chemistry and technology of neuroscience become more widely available, more and more of us will find ourselves confronted by evidence that we are not who we think we are. Tragicomedies of the self will not be confined to the lab for long.