Rob Drummond says to trust him, except it’s not Rob on stage, the interviews he promises are verbatim, they’ve been heavily edited, and at least one is completely fabricated, so can you trust anything anyone says?
Trust and doubt are entangled in this thoroughly self-aware survey of attitudes toward vaccination. In previous, more daring shows, Drummond has invited audience members to shoot a bullet and catch it with their teeth, or dragged a person on a date for the rest of the venue to see. Pins and Needles takes a step back from the intensity of these exchanges, looking a little more evenly, at a more universal issue than risk.
Director Amit Sharma’s crisp production weaves three time-leap interviews onstage, with designer Frankie Bradshaw’s elegant but underused dripping-needle set buzzing every time Gavi Singh Chera (playwright Rob) hits record. Richard Canto is a cheery interviewee as Edward Jenner, the 18th-century inventor of the smallpox vaccine, and Vivienne Acheampong is stoic as his mother, Mary, hurt by a paper (since debunked) that falsely linked the MMR vaccine to autism. Our narrator promises objective impartiality throughout these conversations, but soon breaks that promise when he is seduced by anti-vaccination Robert (Brian Varnell), a lonely man obsessed with coronavirus conspiracy theories.
In Robert and Mary, Drummond sharply illustrates how personal experience can change and radicalize minds, how a medical anomaly or simple bad luck can transform a person’s entire world, and in Jenner he offers a light relief and an outside perspective on our contemporary concerns.
While the explanatory question-and-answer format helps clarify each storyline, the play is at its strongest when firm opinions take a back seat and more obscure, thorny issues come to the fore. A smoldering uncertainty remains, as Drummond constantly and smirkingly reminds us that none of it is entirely trustworthy, but the constant teasing of an unreliable narrator ends up promising more trickery than it delivers. Pins and Needles is a masterful tale of argument and negation, but it longs for a sharper scratch.
At the Kiln Theatre, London until 26 October
