Pins and Needles

A new play by Rob Drummond is pretty much a guarantee of a good evening. In his best shows, which often feature himself, big concepts are presented in fun formats. There was The Majority at the National Theatre that asked the audience to vote on everything from whether latecomers should be admitted to whether a person’s deeply private love letter should be read out on stage. There was Bullet Catch, in which an audience member pointed a gun at his head. And In Fidelity which tried to make two audience members fall in love.

Pins and Needles is about vaccines. Yikes. And how do you do a play about something that has pushed many people to extreme views? Make it verbatim of course. Using the real words of real people is a surefire way to add authority and solemnity. But this is a Drummond play, and the tricksiness starts right from the beginning. The guy on stage says he’s Rob Drummond. Says he’s doing a verbatim play about vaccines. Except that’s not Rob Drummond. That’s actor Gavi Singh Chera.

Writing his own play as he performs it, not-Rob shifts between an interview he did in 2012 with a woman who decided not to give her baby son the MMR vaccine, an interview he did last year with a guy whose mum died from the Covid vaccine, and an interview with Edward Jenner himself, the (apparent) inventor of vaccines.

While the characters talk about the impossibility of knowing what to believe – lies from big pharma, lies by Andrew Wakefield, lies from the government – we too grapple with whether we’re being lied to by Drummond. Verbatim is meant to give the whole thing a sense of authority, of unimpeachability, but Drummond slowly seeds the idea that everything we’re seeing might be made up.

Super clever then, and often funny – Richard Cant’s Jenner periodically picks up a flute to serenade us – but there’s still an overriding sense that we’ve heard these arguments before. Vaccines are harmful, but they saved more lives than they cost etc. And yet… the structure of the play answers any criticisms. If you want to criticise Pins and Needles for rehashing old arguments, or casting judgement, or not casting judgement enough, Drummond pre-empts all of it, and can simply point to the slipperiness of the conceit. Failings are the failings of the people he interviewed. Views expressed are merely theirs; or our own projected onto the play. And what if it’s all made up anyway?

It looks great too, Frankie Bradshaw’s set a metal structure of thin lines reminiscent of some lab experiment, until you realise it’s a children’s playground, swings and climbing frame.

The problem is the delivery. The actors treat their characters like china, with slightly deadened and distant line readings, and a slowness to the whole thing that stops the plentiful humour from landing. Director Amit Sharma - his first show for the Kiln since taking over as artistic director - leans too hard into the solemnity of the verbatim thing and almost undermines it. It’s too arms length, too detached, and the play itself proves too slippery for the production that tries to contain it.