SHARP SCRATCH?
Crossing the Edgware Rd yesterday a shouting vaccine denier with a loudspeaker informed us all, stomping past in some sort of hurry, that vaccines were lies, inoculation an International conspiracy. It reminded me first to book my autumn double at the local pharmacy but then – another evening plan being cancelled – then that I really ought to nip up to Kilburn for Pins and Needles, the Kiln’s latest offbeat booking, opened last week. Written by Rob Drummond , it is about vaccine , trustfulness, disinformation and suspicion, and the nature of scientific method. It’s very meta – keen to keep reminding you that the speaker – posing as the author, played by Gavi Singh Chera – is trying to make a play out of recorded interviews and that the supposed verbatim stuff might be “edited a bit”.
Thus, in an elegant set of neon strips , shapes and steps, he talks first to Mary – Vivienne Acheampong – who was convinced by the now-debunked Andrew Wakefield researchthat MMR caused autism. Having one autistic son already, she deceived her husband, didn’t vaccinate the second; and of course he had an unusually bad bout of measles and was disastrously damaged. This all comes out gradually, skilfully interspersed with the other interviewee – Brian Vernel – who lost his mother from, he thinks a very rare reaction to the Pfizer vaccine and attempted to have her secretly exhumed to prove it. His life is now devoted to antivax propaganda. And near the end, the narrator “Rob” talks of a bereavement of his own, and more self-blame.
It’s an interesting and well-acted examination of the emotions that surge around this aspect of medicine, but for a while suffers tendency towards glum, sad and flat (who the hell wants 80 minutes of glum Covid stories? We have our own!) . What lifts it mercifully soon is the arrival of the 200-years-dead pioneer of smallpox vaccination, Richard Cant as a cheerful, self-confident Edward Jenner, thrilled to hear that the disease is now eradicated, and full of anecdotes – in between short trills on his flute – about how he did it. 18c medicine previously tried a terrible thing called ‘variolation’ to create immunity, but his experiments with the milder cow-pox bore fruit, though experiments on young lads, only one of whom seems to have died from it.
But then, face it, scientific method is king, and as Jenner says, “what happened to Samuel was a statistical likelihood”. Just as the furious antivaxxer’s mother’s blood clot presumably was. Always hard to take. He also remarks that “the plural of anecdote is not evidence”, a motto I shall hold to my heart every time I read some overemotional press tale on a medical subject. Jenner indeed has all the best lines, insisting that in medicine “you have to DO things, not just talk” and that open minds are vital with zealots on both sides, and that we should dwell in “the difficult and murky world of the honest exchange of ideas”. Then, as the play ends, Drummond mentions how much of Jenner’s peacock-pioneer pride is not entirely justified.
Short, interesting, incomplete, thoughtful: I liked it. There will be bigger plays about vaccine – maybe about Jenner himself – as there was about antisepsis in Dr Semmelweis. But this was a good sharp scratch at it…
Kilntheatre.com to 26 october
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