Zoë Robins and Jayden Daniels sizzle as ill-fated lovers in The Effect. Photo / Signy Bjorg
Joanna Wane gets a chemistry lesson on love as the year’s hottest play, The Effect, prepares to steam up the stage in Auckland.
“When she drew near, the rich musk of him wrapped her again: shaving soap, ale, and that delicious, darker something - him. It might as well have been opium for what it did to the run of her thoughts.”
Californian romance writer Julie Anne Long won’t be to everyone’s taste. In the same book quoted above, Beauty and the Spy, she describes the moon as swollen and slung low like a pregnant woman on the brink of birth. Still, you know what she means, right? How the intensity of sexual attraction can feel like mainlining something illegal and being struck by lightning at the same time.
There’s a reason we say two people have “chemistry” when they fall in love (or in lust – sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference). The same reward pathways light up in our brains when we binge on something sweet or when an addict snorts a hit of cocaine. We’re also turned on by certain smells, although the jury is still out on ale.
After decades of research, neuroscientists can tell us exactly what’s happening on a physiological level in our bodies when they’re awash with “love chemicals”, a natural high that feels imbued with a touch of the divine. But if love is a drug that can be mapped in the lab, does it make what you’re experiencing any less real?
That’s the question posed by The Effect, an award-winning play by Succession writer and executive producer Lucy Prebble, which opens in Auckland in April. Originally staged in London in 2012 with Billie Piper in the lead role, it’s been nominated for a 2024 Olivier Award for Best Revival after a return season at the National Theatre and has just premiered off-Broadway in New York.
A social experiment unfolds with unexpected results when Connie and Tristan are cut off from the outside world for five weeks as volunteers on a small clinical trial to test a new anti-depressant. The key component of the drug is high doses of the hormone dopamine, one of those pathway-to-pleasure neurotransmitters that can make you feel euphoric when it floods your brain. “Viagra for the heart”, as a doctor supervising the trial calls it.
When an illicit relationship begins to develop between them, it’s electric. Whether it’s just the meds - and whether that actually matters - is a core theme of the play. For Connie, who’s a psychology student, love is a chemical reaction that can be explained (and manipulated) by science and can’t necessarily be trusted. Tristan, who’s more reckless, is convinced his feelings are authentic. “I can tell the difference between who I am and a side effect,” he tells her. “People meet each other and fall in love in all sorts of ways. It doesn’t matter what starts it.”
Zoë Robins, who plays Connie, knows from personal experience how intoxicating and addictive that kind of intense attraction can be. The last time she fell in love, she was shooting a pilot in New York where her friendship with a fellow actor slow-burned into a heated long-distance relationship. She describes what happened between them as “kind of otherworldly” and almost beyond her control. “It was the wildest, most passionate, wonderful love I’ve ever experienced in my life. There was just no helping me, seriously.”
So, on the question of where love sits - in the head or the heart - you can guess where her sympathies lie. “For Tristan [played by Head High’s Jayden Daniels], it’s all the heart and I can definitely relate to that,” she says. “I like to think there is something quite spiritual and romantic about falling in love. But maybe that’s because I watched too many Disney movies when I was a little girl!”
A former Ninja Steel Power Ranger (the white one), Robins has been one of the core characters in Amazon’s huge fantasy series, The Wheel of Time, since 2021, starring alongside Rosamund Pike. Back in Auckland after filming a third season of the show, she hasn’t worked closely with Daniels before, although they did cross paths briefly on Shortland Street. Directed by Benjamin Kilby-Henson, The Effect also features Sara Wiseman, who recently completed filming King of the Planet of the Apes, and Jarod Rawiri (The Brokenwood Mysteries) playing doctors involved in the drug trial who have a complicated relationship of their own.
Prebble has said she created the role of Connie specifically for Billie Piper, who’d starred in the British writer’s first TV series, Secret Diary of a Call Girl, and teamed with her again in 2020 for I Hate Suzie (“new, lewd and joyously off the rails” is how a UK critic described her performance in that one).
Piper’s emotional bravery is what Prebble wanted brought to the stage. Her play was inspired by a disastrous series of drug trials at a London facility in 2006, where six volunteers suffered multiple organ failure. A number of interesting ethical questions are raised, including the medicalisation of depression and the prioritisation of profit over patient safety. In a classic example of Prebble’s sharp, intelligent writing, Wiseman’s Dr James cynically notes there’s no such thing as side effects - just effects you can’t sell.
It’s the love story that holds it all together, though, drawing on a visceral attraction Prebble herself experienced that surprised her with its intense physicality. “What’s of interest to me,” she told The Guardian, “is the amount we put ourselves at risk emotionally and therefore also physically - because there isn’t really a divide between the emotional and the physical - when we love other people.”
Garth Fletcher, a social psychologist at Victoria University who specialises in the study of romantic relationships, is intrigued by The Effect’s premise. He thinks it’s quite plausible that the high dopamine content of the drug being trialled could act as some kind of love potion, if the conditions are right (moonlight, candles, alcohol) to give someone a nudge in the right direction. During the Covid epidemic, there were plenty of anecdotal reports of platonic friends falling in love when they were stuck in lockdown together.
To turbo-boost the cocktail, Fletcher would add oxytocin into the mix, an even more powerful hormone that’s released during sex (and helps mothers bond with their baby). However, unlike a dose of dopamine, which can cross the brain-blood barrier, no one’s worked out how to do that with oxytocin. “You’d have to inject it directly into their brain and they might notice that,” he says, clearly tickled by the idea. “What are you doing with that syringe?!
“But falling in love with someone is a bit more than that, isn’t it? it’s a very obsessive state and it involves a tremendous building up of commitment. Suddenly you have a startling desire to settle down with a person. So falling in love, bonding with someone, is a very powerful emotion. You can’t just induce it by bunging in some dopamine.”
There’s a line in the play where Toby, the psychiatrist played by Rawiri, says people struggle to frame their brains as a piece of biological machinery because that’s where we believe our souls are housed. Gina Grimshaw, a cognitive scientist and one of Fletcher’s colleagues at Victoria’s School of Psychology, is on board with that one.
“Yeah, I do think your soul is in there, but I also think the mind is what the brain does,” she says. “I know we like to think about love as being somehow different. As a neuroscientist, I’m very much of the view that everything we experience is generated by your brain, because what else would it be? It’s not [being generated] by your toes!”
All sorts of intangible factors go into finding a mate, from cultural influences to sharing the same sense of humour. Having a neural explanation for the way we feel and behave when we’re smitten sounds disappointingly rational, but Grimshaw finds it reassuring. “Love is still love. Knowing where it comes from doesn’t make it any less real. And I think the more you know about how it works, the more magical and wondrous it can be.”
Somatic sexologist Morgan Penn, who co-hosts the Sex.Life podcast with Hayley Sproull, works with that mind-body connection to explore arousal and desire. The podcast, which aims to normalise conversations about sex, is midway through its second series as Penn explores the kink community (in the first series, she went to a sex school in rural New Zealand). Penn also sets Sproull a “homeplay” assignment each week to report back on for the following episode.
She says there are plenty of natural “bio-hacks” that trigger the release of love hormones, but sometimes what draws two people together can’t be explained.
“Even with all the science around love and the parts of our brain that fire off in the pleasure centres when we’re in connection, I’d like to say there’s a mysterious piece none of us still really knows. But we’re actually animals at the end of the day and we overthink a lot of things instead of just moving with what feels good. It really doesn’t matter what the context has been around it. It is happening, and then the choice is whether you give into it or not.”
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the New Zealand Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.
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