ABSTRACT
Since the emergence of modern vaccination in the late nineteenth century, theatre has been a vehicle for advocating, analysing and intervening in the fraught relationship between vaccination and its sceptics. Because vaccination raises issues at the most institutional and intimate registers, it finds a natural forum in a medium – like theatre – that joins the social, the political and the personal. This chapter offers snapshots of this important, but understudied, intersection. The first section examines George Bernard Shaw’s anti-vaccination writings and the origins of his position in the nineteenth-century anti-vaccination movement. Analysing the use of theatre in global public health initiatives in vaccination campaigns, the second section discusses the role of interactive community theatre in vaccination campaigns in Nigeria (1994) and Bangladesh (2019). Finally, the third section considers Jonathan Spector’s 2016 play Eureka Day, which stages the controversies over vaccination in the contemporary United States.
