Writer: Tim Price
Director: Rufus Norris
There’s something about a deathbed retrospective of one’s life that appeals to playwrights. It certainly works in Nye, Tim Price’s account of the life of politician Aneurin “Nye” Bevan, who rose from fighting for his town’s rights against the coal company that ran it to become an MP and, later, the Health Minister who founded the NHS.
Back at the Olivier Theatre for a new run (before once again relocating to co-producers, the Wales Millennium Centre), Michael Sheen reprises his role as Bevan, wheeled onto a ward of the NHS he created after an operation to remove an ulcer, unaware that his surgeons discovered stomach cancer.
From there, the morphine precipitates a plethora of memories from Bevan’s childhood through to adulthood. Scenes in the young Nye’s school, where the stammering youngster was regularly caned for not being able to speak fluently, have a Dennis Potter air to them, the combination of childhood memories and hospital wards evoking memories of The Singing Detective.
Vicki Mortimer’s set design, leaning heavily on green curtains that part, rise and fall, adapts to form libraries, council chambers and even the House of Commons. But it is the performances in front that are the better portion of the work, with Sharon Small providing a particularly grand foil in the shape of Bevan’s formidable partner, Jennie Lee. Whether it is by her husband’s bedside demanding the attention of doctors or, in flashback, standing fiercely as the Commons’ youngest serving MP. Small conveys well the fortitude and grit that characterised her win, yet also allows the glimmers of mischievous charm that causes Sheen’s young, ebullient Welshman to fall for her.
Along the way, and before Bevan gets to his own MP position, we see the young Nye run rings around his local council, utilising every bylaw and loophole to wrest control out of the hands of complacent overlords who assumed they would always be in power. We also witness Nye and his lifelong friend Archie (Jason Hughes) discover the wonders of the local library, allowing Bevan to embrace language to the extent that if he finds a word that causes him to stammer, he finds another, more suitable word to take its place.
The exaltation of the virtues of public libraries, a system that has been under increasing threat in recent years, is one of the subtler political jabs that Price’s script employs. Others – Bevan’s impassioned stance against politicians seeking to cut unemployment benefits among them – are rather more overt, and indeed hit harder in this run than they did in the play’s original production, given the current government’s stance on such matters.
Along the way, Price’s script emphasises the humour of each situation, occasionally to the detriment of the unfolding drama. Sheen, bumbling about in pyjamas, is only occasionally allowed to be the political mastermind others fear him to be, much less the “rutting stag” of his wife’s description.
And although the scenic design and framing device of Bevan’s failing health are predicated on his relationship with the creation of the NHS, it is telling that the play is named after the man and not the institution. The flashbacks only arrive to hint of the service’s creation midway through the second act, as Bevan, a constant thorn in the side of both Tory Leader Winston Churchill (Tony Jayawardena) and Labour’s own Clement Atlee (Stephanie Jacob), is given the health and housing brief in an attempt to neutralise him. Instead, he adopts the principle of a health co-operative from his hometown of Tredegar, where the mineworkers paid into a health insurance scheme that then covered the entire town, and applies it to the whole country.
Visuals of masked-up doctors projected onto the set’s green curtains are, perhaps, the least satisfying part of the play’s whole design. More interesting is Bevan’s political manoeuvring in front of them, making a series of decisions that eventually ward off strike action by doctors and get the BMA on board with the creation of the NHS.
But in these moments, as Sheen strides around the stage decrying the pre-war two-tier healthcare system in which the rich thrive and the poor suffer, we also see hints that his capitulation in certain areas causes cracks that, decades later, become wider fractures. As our modern NHS struggles to maintain the original principle of a universal service free at the point of use, which ensures that illness does not bring financial worries, the biographical tale at the heart of Nye subtly highlights a terrible irony. Aneurin Bevan was the founder of the NHS, which reduced mortality rates and increased life expectancy in the process – but he may also have unwittingly laid the foundations for its own decay.
Continues until 16 August 2025, then at Wales Millennium Centre 22-30 August 2025
