Nye
The time is once again Nye, as Michael Sheen returns to the National Theatre to reprise firebrand politician and NHS founder, Aneurin Bevan, in Tim Price’s play, after Rufus Norris’s production originally debuted last year.
The state of the country’s health and that of Nye himself are intwined from the start, as we open on a huge chest x-ray projected onto hospital-green curtains behind the bed-ridden deputy leader of the Labour Party. It’s July 1960. His anxious wife Jennie Lee (Sharon Small) and childhood friend Archie Lush (Jason Hughes) are by his side and his doctor is concerned. We’re here, it’s increasingly clear, for the end of his life.
Plunging us into Nye’s unconscious, Price gives us a dream-like portrait of his life, as Nye recalls its events in neuron-like bursts. There are parallels between the coal miner-turned-politician challenging schoolroom bullying in Tredegar, his working-class Welsh hometown, in the early 1900s, to upsetting the members’ club snobbery of Parliament as a new MP. Paule Constable’s ever-shifting lighting design melds beautifully with Steven Hoggett and Jess Williams playful choreography, snatching feather-light moments of humour from the darkness.
The playful and somnambulant tone of Norris’s production perfectly suits the portrait of a man whose sometimes bulldozing lack of subtlety was one of his defining traits. Sheen is predictably great at combining Nye’s burning sense of belief in welfare for all and his irascibility within a...
