The Sugar Syndrome
The Sugar Syndrome is Prebble’s earliest full-length play, produced at Royal Court Theatre in London in 2003, the year after she graduated from university. It centers on Dani, a 17-year-old girl with an eating disorder who is repeatedly let down by the people in her life and the structures of contemporary society. Her wealthy father supports her and her mother financially, but is otherwise absent. Her mother, Jan, is so consumed by her own loneliness and self-loathing that she fails to help her daughter navigate those same burdens. While Jan got Dani treatment for her disorder, she denies her the care and compassion she needs to stay healthy afterward. Lewis, the twenty-something man Dani hooks up with via an internet chatroom, becomes fixated on her, but she knows that she is merely an accessory to his masculine self-image. In the chatroom, she also meets a convicted paedophile named Tim. When she leaves home, Tim takes her in. They develop what seems to be a mutually-supportive friendship, until she begins to suspect he may not be the benevolent confidante he seems.
All four characters want to break their destructive patterns, but fall prey to the sugar syndrome, a phenomenon Jan explains to Dani in which British people in World War Two would use their ration tokens for sweets instead of healthy food because the instant boost was more seductive than long-term sustenance. Prebble avoids making any of the characters simple villains, and instead creates a more nuanced reflection of our complicated world by letting the audience glimpse the pain and struggles Jan, Lewis, and Tim experience in our rapacious society. As Tim says, if you want to indulge your vice, “you just have to look around” and Dani laments “everyone tells you to get well but they’re all working to keep you ill.”
The Sugar Syndrome is the most stylistically conventional of Prebble’s plays, although her incorporation of online chatroom dialogues into several scenes was quite innovative at the time of its premiere. While this form of communication has now become so common in plays that it feels realistic, the convention still felt abstract in those early days of widespread internet use.
Read The Sugar Syndrome Act 2, Scene 1
The Effect
The Effect, which premiered as a co-production between the National Theatre and Headlong in 2012, explores what causes human feelings and how we can (or cannot) control those feelings. The central character, Connie, falls for her fellow patient, Tristan, during an in-residence trial for an anti-depressant drug. As Connie struggles to determine whether her feelings are “real” or induced by the drug, her doctors argue over the effectiveness of anti-depressants. The question of whether pharmaceutical interventions relieve depression is personal to Dr James, who suffers from the malady and attempted suicide several years ago after a fling with Dr Sealey. In the play, Prebble invites us to care deeply about these characters, while simultaneously informing us about medical practices and mood disorders, and posing profound questions about the nature of our emotions.
The Effect, with its clinical environment and rapidly-shifting focus between the four characters, is written for a spare set and few to no costume changes. The scenes shift quickly and overlap with no clear delineation of scene breaks in the script, leaving productions to indicate shifts of time and location with lighting and sound cues. Each time Connie and Tristan take their drugs, Dr James announces the dosage to the audience and counts down to cue them to swallow the pills. The beeping of EKGs in intense moments represent the patients’ accelerating heartbeats. Dr Sealey holds a prop brain in his hand as he describes his research to the audience, then Dr James does the same as she gives a wrenching description of her depressive episodes. Even in this small-cast play with its focus on the emotional experience of the characters, Prebble chooses non-realistic conventions to tell her story.
All four of Prebble’s plays have received awards and critical praise, but The Effect is perhaps the most acclaimed, having been named one of the ‘40 best plays of all time’ by The Independent in 2022 and enjoying an Olivier-nominated revival at the National Theatre in 2023.
Enron
Enron, which premiered at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 2009 and went on to London’s Royal Court, the West End, and Broadway, tells the true story of the rise and fall of a giant American energy company at the turn of the 21st century. The play spans roughly a decade - from the corporation’s adoption of mark-to-market accounting methods, through the executives’ increasingly unethical manipulation of their financial statements and the devastating electricity blackouts caused by their greed, to the company’s financial collapse. President Jeffrey Skilling, CFO Andy Fastow, and CEO Ken Lay are the architects and enablers of this catastrophe. Motivated by their growing hubris and greed and detached from empathy-building connections to those whose lives their actions impact, they build a precarious, predatory company that ultimately destroys the finances of their lower-level employees and causes the death of some of their customers.
In telling this story, Prebble faced the challenge of making an esoteric topic – the complex ramifications of an accounting system on an energy business – comprehensible and theatrically compelling to audiences. While other playwrights might have chosen to tackle this challenge with a conventional plot structure centered on an interpersonal conflict, Prebble took a different approach. Enron traces Skilling, Fastow, and Lay’s decisions and their consequences through a multi-year trajectory. The voices of other employees, financial analysts, and even Skilling’s young daughter are woven throughout, as are references to concurrent social and political developments so that the audience can place the events in a broader context. To convey the high stakes of the situation, Prebble relies heavily on metaphorical staging devices. She manifests the special purpose entities Fastow used to hide the company’s mounting debt (which the real Fastow referred to as “raptors”) by having three velociraptors (played by actors) skulk menacingly around the characters. She describes Fastow’s office as a lair where paper and office paraphernalia create a web that visually seems to support the Enron offices seen on platforms above it. She places a projection of Enron’s fluctuating stock price onstage as a sort of visual underscoring that increases tension. Through this dramatic structure and these staging devices, Prebble effectively conveys the labyrinthian methods that Enron used to deceive and betray their employees and the public.
Read Enron Act 1, Scene 9
A Very Expensive Poison
A Very Expensive Poison premiered at London’s Old Vic Theatre in 2019. It is based on Luke Harding’s book of the same name and tells the true story of Alexander Litvinenko’s murder by the Russian state. Litvinenko (called by his nickname Sasha in the play) was a Russian detective who sought asylum in the UK with his wife Marina and son after being imprisoned by Putin’s government for investigating corruption. Sasha’s and Marina’s story unfolds through a series of nested flashbacks, from the mid-1990s when Sasha began investigating ties between politicians and organized crime in Russia, to his murder in London in 2006 and the subsequent investigations, through to 2016 when the British High Court published their conclusion that he was assassinated, probably on the orders of Vladimir Putin. Marina’s quest lies at the heart of the play – first she seeks to protect her husband, then, after his death, to bring the truth to light. Through her eyes, we see the very personal repercussions of political systems that allow the powerful to destroy individual lives and deny justice to the wronged.
Just as with Enron, A Very Expensive Poison required Prebble to wrangle a complex, real-life story into dramatic form. To do so, she fully embraced non-realistic and metatheatrical devices, including overlapping scenes taking place in different times and places, direct address to the audience by numerous characters, and even an outrageous, comical entrance through the seats by one of Litvinenko’s bumbling assassins. Prebble’s repeated acknowledgement of the theatrical context (in another example, two characters introduce themselves to one another by noting they have not met because they exist in different timelines in the story), as well as her inclusion of humor, give the audience some needed relief from the frightening seriousness of the subject matter and allow them to embrace the fragmented nature of the plot, with its dozens of characters and locations and multi-year time span. In an era where critics frequently criticize plays – particularly those about real events - as “overly cinematic,” Prebble delivers just the opposite; this is a script distinctly written for fluid staging amid a live audience.
Read A Very Expensive Poison Act 2, Scene 6
Image on home page: Gillian Budd and Ashley Rolfe in Lucy Prebble's "Enron" directed by Rupert Goold at the Noel Coward Theatre in London. (Photo by Robbie Jack/Corbis via Getty Images).
The plays discussed here can be found in the Core Collection. If you would like to explore this collection further and your institution does not yet have access, please ask your librarian to contact us to arrange a free trial.
Visit our Previously Featured Content page to view other topics including Feminist Theatre and the Prison System, Shakespeare and Queer Theory, Global Theatre in Translation, Decolonizing the Theatre Space, Devising Theatre, Interpreting Shakespeare: Discover the First Folio, The Plays of Caryl Churchill, Women in Shakespeare, Drama without Borders: Stories of migrants and refugees, The Climate Crisis in Theatre, Black British Playwrights, and LGBTQ+ Playwrights.
