Review: NYE, National Theatre

With food rationed, an exhausted people trudged over bombsites to get to rebuild their battered nation, the euphoria of VE Day not forgotten, but receding - there was a peace to be won. But one awkward, audacious man (backed by another, but much quieter, installed at Number 10) could see his shining city on a hill, one with hospitals that treated people according to need, GPs who required no payment to see kids with rashes and coughs, dentists who saved working men from medieval extractions. How did an autodidact Welsh firebrand will the NHS into being?

Tim Price’s play doesn’t really tell us - the jaw-jaw grind of winning arguments in smoky committee rooms is not his concern. He conjures a fantasia of imaginings, as Aneurin Bevan lies dying in an NHS hospital bed, his mind assailed by morphine induced fever dreams, memories and visions bubbling up involuntarily. If you’re thinking The Singing Detective, you’re not wrong. 

What emerges is a collage of scenes that illustrate the emotional momentum that drove Nye towards his immense achievement. There isn’t much forensic analysis of the issues, precious little character development of the men and women who touch his life, and touch of slabby exposition to get everyone up to speed. Rather like the NHS itself, it’s flawed, sprawling and unmanageable - but when it works, it’s magnificent.

Michael Sheen, in the part he was surely born to play, is on stage throughout, carrying the play and the man with equal passion. We see the charisma, the dynamism and bloody-mindedness that Clement Attlee (Stephanie Jacob) saw when he gave him the toughest job in his Cabinet. We also see the sentimentality, the performative working class chippiness and a laudable, perhaps guilty, pragmatism eventually poking through. Sheen catches Nye’s lightning in a bottle.   

As a child in Tredegar, Nye stutters at school and is beaten by a sadistic teacher for it before his classmates rescue him, a lesson in how the capricious cruelty of authority can be defeated by determined collective solidarity. Later, he jousts with a man of similar temperament but diametrically opposed politics, Winston Churchill, who teaches him the art of judicious compromise, while both men respect game recognising game. In a dazzling scene, the massed ranks of the British Medical  Association, like the gods on Mount Olympus, face him down and he, like Tony Blair fifty years later negotiating the Good Friday Agreement, buries his considerable ego to concede and concede and concede - but also to win. Jon Driscoll’s video work is as good as I’ve seen in a theatre, a tour de force.

Other elements are less successful. Sharon Small can do little with the underwritten role of his wife, Jennie Lee, a considerable politician in her own right, but largely seen bickering with his lifelong friend Archie Lush (Roger Evans) as Nye lies, unconscious, hooked up to the machine that goes beep. Tony Jayawardena gives an amusing turn as Churchill, Nye’s Conservative opponent and Jon Furlong is equally good as Herbert Morrison, his conservative opponent on the government benches. But they’re turns, written only to show, not without some amusement for our pleasure, that it wasn’t just doctors who wanted to strangle the NHS at birth.

Director, Rufus Norris (in his valedictory year at the National and celebrating significant government funding announced on the very afternoon of opening night) does permit plenty to come through the narrative that feels a little too on the nose for 2024 - this is not a play that is interested in political neutrality. But in scenes in which Nye fails to connect with his dying father (he suffers from Black Lung, a hideous respiratory disease that carried off so many miners), we see our man’s strength and weakness.

Like so many ideologues, he was more interested in principles than people, the abstract more comfortable than the messy work of dealing with real individuals. Nye’s long-suffering sister, Arianwen (Kazrena James) never understood that but his wife did, Jennie Lee and Nye Bevan navigating an open marriage. That underlying disconnect between principles and people is still there in the NHS today, the clarity of thinking that breathed life into it. reifying it into an unchallengeable shibboleth for so many Brits. Contact with real life has been diminishing it since, voters placing a cross too often against those who will not fund it adequately. Loud voices veto the kind of innovative thinking that delivers much better outcomes (albeit at a higher cost) in comparable countries overseas. An emphasis on treatment above prevention that lies at the heart of Nye's conception of a sevice, increasingly damaging a population and medicine very different from 76 years ago.

Those thoughts come later. You leave, with a nod towards St Thomas’s and Bart’s both close by, walking tall, grateful that Our Country then did This Thing then. And you wonder where the Bevan of today is, for Our Country now who can do This Thing now. God knows, we need them.        

Nye at The National Theatre until 11 May, captured and broadcast live on 23 April and at the Wales Millennium Centre from 18 May until 1 June

Photo Credits: Johan Persson

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