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Michael Sheen shines as the firebrand Welsh founder of the NHS Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan in Tim Price’s bouncy 2024 hagiography, revived by its director Rufus Norris as one of the productions marking the end of his ten years running the National. You can see why he brought it back: this is a big but eloquently simple piece of populist theatre, with a star leading a fine ensemble, exploring one of the creation stories of modern Britain.
But the play remains irksomely lumpy: sentimental one minute, overloaded with details on council proceedings in 1920s Tredegar the next. It unfolds in flashback, as Nye lies dying in 1960 in one of the NHS wards he brought into being. Price makes Nye’s motivation painfully obvious, from guilt over his miner father’s death from black lung to blazing anger at the wily Winston Churchill’s incompetent or self-serving wartime policies. A lifelong stutter spurred Nye on to become an autodidact and an orator, we gather.
Norris and designer Vicki Mortimer create a hospital-green swirl of sweeping curtains, spinning beds and billowing sheets on the vast Olivier stage, accompanied by the bleep and blip of a heart monitor. It coalesces into a library, the Parliamentary chamber, the bar where Nye chats up fellow MP and future wife Jennie Lee (Sharon Small) by emulating a rutting stag. At one point it morphs into a delicious Busby Berkeley-style routine to Get Happy.
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Massed armies of the needy and the faces of masked, implacable surgeons are projected behind Nye, like hordes from the Lord of the Rings. “No health minister has ever persuaded the British Medical Association to agree to… anything,” Stephanie Jacob’s Clement Atlee tells Nye, in one of the many heavy-handed parallels Price draws between the 1930s and 40s and now.
Sheen’s Nye stumbles through it all, barefoot and in pyjamas that make him look like a teddy purchased in a hospital gift shop. Even as a cocksure adult and radical MP for Ebbw Vale his Nye never quite loses the air of a wondering child. Sheen’s protean ability has enabled him to play real people (Tony Blair, Prince Andrew), angels (Good Omens), Shakespeare heroes and even a grumpy version of himself (Staged) throughout his career. Yet he always retains a core of likeability that is key to the success of his Nye.
Among the supporting cast, Tony Jayawardena is a delight as a crafty, toad-like Churchill, while Jacobs’s Atlee glides menacingly towards Nye behind a motorised desk, like a beady, centrist Davros. Price and Norris compensate for the innate sexism of the era depicted by giving big, contextualizing speeches to Small’s fiery Jennie and Kezrena James as Nye’s sister Arianwen.
Amid the selective, broad-strokes depiction of Nye’s career and his success in forcing the NHS into being against monolithic opposition in 1948, there are some moments of quiet beauty. Discovering literacy in the library, he is borne aloft by members of the cast. Jayawardena and James double as the doctor and nurse tending him at the end. Rhodri Meilir as Nye’s dad shows him a seam of coal that courses through rock like an ECG pulse, and the play ends with the dimming of his miners’ lamp. For Nye Bevan, it was always about people.
Until 16 Aug, nationaltheatre.org.uk.
