Pins and Needles: The vaccine debates reignited – to powerful effect
After 12 years spent revitalising Kilburn’s Kiln Theatre – which was named the Tricycle when she took it over – Indhu Rubasingham has left to become the National Theatre’s new artistic director. Her successor is Amit Sharma, whose first production is a chatty, getting-to-know-you piece, breaking the fourth wall at regular intervals, and grappling with the trustworthiness of science in a lively spirit of debate.
The subject is vaccines – yes, in 2024, not 2021 – and no, Covid isn’t the only thing on the mind of playwright Rob Drummond, who has written himself into the play as an emcee, “Rob”. Played by an earnest and cheery Gavi Singh Chera, he navigates us through this still-contentious topic, on a stepped stage with a climbing-frame backdrop. The ladders and swings are red and blue in Frankie Bradshaw’s design, like the pills you can choose between in The Matrix.
About a third of Drummond’s text is an imagined interview with Edward Jenner, the Georgian physician who invented the smallpox vaccine, when he experimentally injected an eight-year-old boy with cowpox (hence “vaccine”, from the Latin for cow) and observed the resulting miracle of immunity.
Jenner, jauntily embodied by Richard Cant with a flute to hand, is our closest character to comic relief – he insists on lavishly signing a release form, despite having been dead for two centuries. But he also expresses horror that his life-saving methodology has become so controversial in the present day, and prods away impotently (to repeat: he’s a dead, flute-playing Georgian doctor) at various strains of anti-vaxx rationale.
Rob speaks with two people on that embattled side of the fence today, in what purport to be verbatim exchanges, the truth of which will be intriguingly muddied later. One is Mary (poignant Vivienne Acheampong), a mother of two hoodwinked by Andrew Wakefield’s discredited 1998 case study in the Lancet, which linked the MMR vaccine to autism. She admits withholding the jab from her second boy – with deeply tragic consequences – to prevent him growing up with autism, as the first had.
Then there’s the brutally disaffected Robert (Brian Vernel), whose story is more commonplace: his mother was fine, then he urged Pfizer upon her, and now blames himself (and every institution he believed) for the myocarditis that killed her.
Rob tries to commiserate with the sheer bad luck of these scenarios, while Jenner mutters “correlation is not causation”. The play makes a basic show of both-sides-ing while planting both feet squarely in the camp of consensus: Drummond doesn’t let such outliers shake anyone’s core certainties for long.
But he does raise valuable questions about the science we’re fed as gospel, and how assuming the truth of it, whatever profit motives may be in play, is a blind habit we all share. For an encore, the artifice of the piece itself is deconstructed – wigs come off – and the author leaves us on shaky ground about the very nature of authority. At a brisk 80 minutes, it’s more of a chewy snack than a full meal, but the witty layering is welcome.
Until Oct 26; kilntheatre.com