Director: Diāna Kaijaka
In the roles: Kristīne Nevarauska, Imants Strads, Marta Lovisa Jančevska, Meinards Liepiņš.
The formula for happiness remains undiscovered, but the theory of love is underdeveloped. However, we don’t want anything more and at the same time nothing less than happiness and love from life, do we?
“The Effect” tells the story of two young people who cannot decide whether their love is real or merely a side effect of antidepressants. They are part of a clinical study, but the love and the physical changes it brings threaten to disrupt the experiment or, conversely, become a sensation if the researchers manage to prove that love is caused by the drugs being tested.
British playwright and the creator of the series Succession (on HBO), Lucy Preble, has received three Emmy Awards and three Olivier Awards for Best Playwriting (including for the play The Effect). Her play The Effect presents an experiment – what would happen if the drugs that make us happy also made us open to love? Would it be the true and naïve formula for happiness and the theory of love? Or would it be yet another lie – an illusion we have created for ourselves to avoid facing life in all its diversity – in success and failure, joy and sorrow, health and illness?
Set and costume designer: Ieva Kauliņa
Music composer: Ernests Valts Circenis
Lighting designer: Reinis Zalte
