Nye – National Theatre, London

Writer: Tim Price

Director: Rufus Norris

Although only invented in 1948, the NHS is the backbone of British identity and to lose it would shatter our sense of what it means to live in modern Britain. However, this co-production by The National Theatre and Wales Millennium Centre, belatedly celebrating the 75^th anniversary of the NHS, doesn’t tell the story of universal free healthcare, once the envy of the world, but instead looks at its creator, Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan. Michael Sheen gives a wonderfully charismatic performance as Nye, but Rufus Norris’s attempts to make Tim Price’s fragmented biography theatrical are not always successful.

That’s not to say Nye is dead on arrival – far from it, in fact – but the play lacks drama. We already know that the NHS was created despite the disdain of Winston Churchill’s Tories. And with the play opening with Bevan in a hospital bed we realise that we are witnessing his last days, dying in an institution that he created. Drugged up on morphine, administered to relieve the pain caused by an operation that reveals cancer in his stomach, the Labour politician hallucinates parts of his past in which he always wears his hospital pyjamas.

We see him at school where the teacher canes him for his stutter and we see his journey from town councillor to MP for the Welsh constituency of Ebbw Vale, a position he held from 1929 to 1960. In both roles, the working-class Nye challenges elitism and bureaucracy. But due to the brevity of such scenes mainly played for laughs, we never truly understand his motives to “help everyone”, although Price tries hard to convince us that the death of Bevan’s father by pneumoconiosis, caused by working for years in the coal mines, triggered his altruist vision.

The machinations of government, local and national, can be a dry subject and so one council meeting is turned into a quiz show and parliamentary showdowns are mined for their absurdity. The politicians of the time are portrayed as grotesque figures. A deskbound Clement Atlee (a delightfully slimy Stephanie Jacob) hovers around the stage like Dr Who’s Davros while Tony Jayawardena’s Churchill who calls Bevan a “brave coward” is all bluster and cigar fug. Nicholas Khan is a dapper but deluded Neville Chamberlain.

In contrast, Sheen’s Nye is childlike and idealistic, enjoying his new power as if he were at his own birthday party. However, it is Nye’s naivete and honesty that helps him cut through the red tape and tradition. Sheen never stops being boyish, even when he is battling the doctors who initially refuse to work for the NHS as the deadline, July 5, looms. His exuberance and ability to compromise see him meet his dreams.

Director Norris is right to focus on the humour, but his concept lacks a framework. One scene is played as a musical number with the whole cast singing and dancing to Get Happy whereas later, he screens images of modern-day health workers on Vicki Mortimer’s inventive set of green hospital curtains. The rest of the cast is always busy in the background, throwing sheets on hospital ward beds or bunched together drinking cups of tea in rhythm as Nye argues with prime ministers and deputy prime ministers. Each scene is entertaining, but there is no overarching style to give the show a solid and coherent identity.

Only Nye’s wife, herself a prominent politician, one of only five female MPs in Parliament at the time, escapes caricature. Jennie Lee, a no-nonsense Sharon Small, announces early in the play that she wanted to be a prime minister but, after meeting Nye, decided to focus on his career instead. They work together as if maintaining a garden with Nye planting ideas and Lee tending to them as they grow. Despite her confidence and ambition, Lee becomes a familiar figure, the self-sacrificing wife.

One of the reasons that Bevan was able to push forward his policies was, as Herbert Morrison (a funny Jon Furlong) affirms, down to its simplicity. If only the management of the NHS were so simple now. The National Theatre audience laughs out loud when the doctors of 1948 threaten to go on strike and yet although Norris and Price allude to the crisis that the NHS always seems to be facing, Nye is not a political play calling out today’s government for its mishandling of the most recent pay disputes. Instead, Nye is steeped in nostalgia for a time when it seemed we really did want to care for everyone.

Runs until 11 May 2024 and then at Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff 18 May — 1 June 2024