Review: PINS AND NEEDLES, Kiln Theatre

Rob Drummond’s new play, Pins and Needles, is a searing indictment of… well, something, I’m just not sure what. And that is, of course, its strength, as it is actually, in heavy disguise, not an indictment of anything, but a celebration of complication.

There’s a bit of meta stuff to get through first which, although it has more justification in this script than in most, its irritation still outweighs its cleverness, It’s becoming the theatre gimmick of 2024 taking over from the near ubiquitous onstage handheld camera of 2023.  

Rob, the playwright, addresses us directly (strong “Welcome to my TED Talk” vibes there) in a framing device about writing a play. He’ll do it a couple of times more and, we do eventually get a pay off from this fourth wall breaking in a denouement that sends us back on to the Kilburn High Road with BIG IDEAS in our heads.

The play settles into three interweaving, separate conversations which are intended to provide material for a verbatim play. Rob is our fixed point around which the real and surreal swirl, our friend and guide. Gavi Singh Chera lends him a warm charisma, part-sympathetic interviewer, part-narrator, saying all the right things to provoke the responses he needs. Nevertheless, his inability to stay out of the story is a testament to the subtelty of the writing and presents an underlying key theme of the play - that there is no “taking no sides” position available on ethical questions, nor, indeed, in theatremaking.

It takes a while to get there, but director, Amit Sharma, has opened his account as Artistic Director of the Kiln Theatre with a pacy, 80 minutes, all-through production that augurs well for the future. (You see how infectious this ‘jumping out of the narrative’ meta stuff is once you get a taste for it?)

Anyway, we first meet Mary in an interview conducted over a decade ago in the backwash of the MMR scandal. Vivienne Acheampong captures the sadness of an educated woman who paid the price for believing - reasonably so - the subsequently discredited work of Andrew Wakefield, who had dishonestly linked the rise in autism diagnoses to the rollout of the Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccine. We’re twice told that correlation is not causation, a lesson that requires learning every ten years at least, so seductive is its pull. 

Next up is Robert, a grieving, angry anti-vaxxer who blames Pfizer’s jab for the death of his beloved mother. Brian Vernal could easily play the part as caricature, the autodidact doing his own ‘research’ online during lockdown, propagating conspiracy theories on own channel, screaming accusations on protest marches. But there’s a self-respect and dignity in Robert and a useful lesson on how those who claim to be ostracised by an interconnected set of institutions in cahoots with The State, often have genuine evidence to provoke their outrage.

Heavy stuff with high stakes, but there’s relief available in Richard Cant’s Edward Jenner, the flute-playing wit whose work led to the adoption of vaccines worldwide. In period costume and astonished at the sight of 21st century technology, Cant gets the West Country accent of the man who infected kids with cowpox to provoke immunity from smallpox, just right, a charming source to tell us about the costs and benefits of vaccination programmes.

Different people will home in on different themes within this play, a perfect example of what this venue should be producing. Two conclusions will stay with me, both of which I knew, both of which I’d kinda forgotten. Firstly, the phrase ‘inexact science’ is somewhat redundant - all science is inexact, it’s just the extent of that inexactitude that varies. Secondly, The Truth of any story, any play, is not an external, objective structure to be revealed, but an ever-evolving subjective, socio-psychological construct we make and remake every time we consider it. That is not to say that all truths are equally valid in a world of competing ‘alternative facts’ but to acknowledge that the complicated and the complex, uncomfortable as they are, can only be embraced not reduced.

In courts, the judiciary have been advised to tell jurors they should be “satisfied so that they are sure” a defendant is guilty before convicting. It’s plays like this one that pull at the thread of that word ‘sure’. And rightly so - that is art’s awkward, spiky, discomfitting challenge to faith, to pragmatism, to complacency. 

Photo images: Mark Senior