“I’m going to look after you,” croons Michael Sheen’s Nye to his dying father. “I’m going to look after everyone.” It is a pivotal moment in Tim Price’s play on the man who dreamed the dream of Healthcare for All.
Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan was a self-educated political idealist driven by a sense of injustice that only a man from an impoverished working-class background can appreciate fully.
Far from a documentary of the birth of the NHS, it is a fantasy of a man once labelled a “fantasist”.
Outgoing National Theatre chief Rufus Norris directs and delivers one of his best productions to date.
A simple hospital ward set is draped with green curtains that reveal patients, politicians and Parliament.
They also serve as screens for images, including ghosts of people who have died due to lack of affordable healthcare. Aiming for mythical status, it occasionally reaches it.
It opens with Nye awakening in hospital after an operation to remove an ulcer. His wife Jennie Lee and best friend Archie Lush (Sharon Small and Roger Evans, both terrific) are arguing about how to tell him that something far worse has been discovered.
Subsequently, the narrative is conveyed as a morphine-induced series of hallucinatory memories.
The real treasures lie after the interval when Norris lets rip with imagery. A trip down a mineshaft with his Da (Rhodri Meilir) is beautifully depicted.
The dialogue becomes more impassioned and the face-offs between Nye and Churchill (Tony Jayawardena) and Deputy PM Herbert Morrison (Michael Keane) carry substantial weight. Sheen conveys Nye’s weaknesses and strengths, doubts and bloody-mindedness with supreme conviction. The result is a moving but unsentimental portrait of the man who changed British healthcare.
- Nye is currently playing at the National Theatre until May 11.
