Rob Drummond tells us to trust him. Except the man on stage isn’t Rob, the interviews that he promises are verbatim have been heavily edited, and at least one of them is made up entirely. So how can we trust anything anyone says?
Trust and doubt lurk on the shoulders of this ultra-self-aware investigation into attitudes towards vaccinations. In previous, daring shows, Drummond has invited an audience member to shoot a bullet for him to catch with his teeth, and dragged individuals into dates played out for the rest of the room. Pins and Needles takes a step back from the intensity of those interactions and is a little flatter for it, levelling its gaze instead at a more universal question of risk.
Director Amit Sharma’s crisp staging weaves three time-leaping interviews across the stage, with designer Frankie Bradshaw’s elegant but underused set of dripping needles buzzing every time Gavi Singh Chera (as the playwright, Rob) presses record. Richard Cant is a jovial interviewee as Edward Jenner, the 18th-century inventor of the smallpox vaccination, while Vivienne Acheampong is stoic as Mary, a mother burned by the since-debunked paper falsely linking the MMR vaccine to autism. Our narrator promises detached impartiality throughout these conversations but is quickly lured out of it by anti-vaxxer Robert (Brian Vernel), a lonely man won over by Covid-19 conspiracies.
With Robert and Mary, Drummond needles at how personal experiences can shift and even radicalise a mind; how a medical anomaly – or pure bad luck – can alter a person’s entire world. With Jenner, he offers light relief and an outside eye to our contemporary concerns.
While the over-explanatory Q&A format allows clarity for each story, the play is strongest when firm opinions take a backseat, allowing murkier, thornier problems to come to the fore. A simmering uncertainty remains from Drummond’s constant, smirking reminder that none of this is wholly trustworthy, but the continual tease of an unreliable narrator ultimately promises more tricksiness than it delivers. Pins and Needles is a sleek story of debate and denial, but it longs for a slightly sharper scratch.
• At the Kiln theatre, London, until 26 October
