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 single scene. As we skip around his timeline, Sheen, clad in pyjamas, has the bewilderment of a child trying to make sense of the world.
There’s also a moving performance from Sharon, as Jennie, full of angles and edges. She captures the sharp, internalised grief at the imminent end of their open marriage alongside a deep-rooted frustration that her own political career became subsumed in supporting the rise of his legend. This knotty emotional dimension is the line that threads through the Nye’s-eye view of cartoon-like elitist politicians, including Tony Jayawardena’s gleefully unlikeable Winston Churchill.
If the first half of the play is about a contrarian child-turned-adult, who uses books to overcome his stammer and become a committed socialist, fighting for the rights of coal miners, the second is about the compromises leading to Nye’s greatest legacy: the formation of the NHS in 1948. Price crafts a fascinating story of a man whose principles were his greatest strength but also something he would mould for a goal.
This production sometimes veers close to sentimentalism as we reach the formation of the NHS but always pull back to hit the audience somewhere real and powerful. At a time when Nye’s vision of a society that takes care of its weakest and most vulnerable feels like it’s being chipped away daily by career politicians, this play is a rallying cry for the power of empathy and bloody-minded humanitarianism.
