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This is a review of the March 2024 production at the National Theatre, which is now being revived
It will be, says Michael Sheen’s Nye Bevan, eyes blazing, as he steps to the front of the National Theatre’s huge Olivier stage, “the most civilised step this country has ever taken”. He’s talking about the National Health Service, about the great, humanitarian principle of a health service free at the point of delivery, about an institution that remains cherished above all others by the British people. And in Tim Price’s epic new play about the Welsh Labour politician Aneurin “Nye” Bevan, he’s speaking across the decades to the present day, when the beleaguered NHS lies on its own sickbed, delivering an account of how and why the health service was born and the radical impulse behind it.
A mighty, moving and sometimes messy piece of theatre, it’s really, at heart, a state-of-the-nation play. And like Dear England and Standing at the Sky’s Edge before it, Nye (a co-production with the Wales Millennium Centre) seizes this venue’s great potential as a national public forum to frame critical questions about who we are and who we want to be.
It’s also a drama that picks up Bevan’s audacity and runs with it, shrugging off sober realism for a swirling fantasia. Here Bevan, who as secretary of state for health spearheaded the creation of the NHS in 1948, lies dying in one of his own hospitals, his life swimming before him as he drifts in morphine-inflected dreams. He actually died at home, but that poetic licence is part and parcel of this show’s ethos, which bundles up the political fight to launch the NHS with a private reckoning with conscience.
So, as Bevan’s wife, MP Jennie Lee, and life-long friend Archie Lush (Roger Evans) sit by his sickbed, we dart with his troubled mind around key moments that have brought him to this point: a classroom rebellion against a teacher caning the young Nye for stammering; an epiphany in a public library when he realises how a wider vocabulary can help him; buccaneering moments as a union rep for miners; parliamentary showdowns; a key wartime exchange with Churchill that makes the firebrand young politician see the point of political compromise. At the centre of it all is his sense of guilt and impotence at his father’s terrible death from pneumoconiosis, which Price sees as a key psychological factor in his determination to establish healthcare accessible to all.
Director Rufus Norris stages all this with wit and drive, using Vicki Mortimer’s canny set design of sliding hospital curtains to send scenes tumbling over one another as they do in dreams. At one point the screens stack up in rows, like benches in the House of Commons; at another, several hospital beds — and their startled occupants — are tipped on their sides to form the tables for a committee meeting. Like a Greek chorus, an ever-busy cast plays patients, politicians, miners, doctors — and, in one memorably moving scene, a crowd of desperate ordinary people importuning Bevan on behalf of their sick relatives.
There are casualties to this approach. There’s a tendency to reach for stereotypes and to push political points that don’t need pushing. There’s also so much going on that we don’t get enough of an up-close study of Bevan the man, or of the critical period when the postwar Labour party heaved the welfare state into being. The play is often at its best when it focuses on personal exchanges, particularly between Nye and Jennie — a remarkable politician in her own right, played here with fiery wit by Sharon Small.
But this is, unashamedly, a play about principle, passion and compassion, driven by a fantastic ensemble and an electrifying performance from Sheen. Even in his pink pyjamas, his Bevan has a stature that throws down a gauntlet to today’s politicians across the river Thames.
★★★★☆
To August 16, nationaltheatre.org.uk
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