Ruth Leon Pocket theatre review…

Nye – National Theatre Olivier

Plays are like buses, you don’t see one for ages and then two come along together. I wrote last week about The Human Body, Lucy Kirkwood’s new play at the Donmar about the birth of the NHS. This week Nye opened at the National, a biographical memory play about the socialist politician who, almost single-handedly, gave birth to the NHS.

The Human Body focuses on one woman, a GP who believes in a universal health system as most doctors just after the War, did not. She is fiction, emblematic of all the health workers who fought, and still fight, against incredible odds to make this extraordinary social experiment work.

Aneurin Bevan was real, an unlikely hero who emerged from the Welsh coalfields with an unquenchable desire to make health care available to all, to “save everyone”. With the support of his wife, Jennie Lee, whose own remarkable career only happened after his death, he bullied, pushed, compromised (but not very much), and persuaded his Parliamentary colleagues to pass the 1946 bill that brought the NHS – tax supported health care free at the point of delivery – to everyone. By the day of its launch, July 5, 1948, 94% of the population was enrolled.

The only choice to play Bevan, known as Nye, was inevitably the Welsh actor Michael Sheen at his best. We meet him when he is dying in an NHS hospital bed from which he soon emerges to live out, in his red striped pyjamas, all the important moments and crucial relationships of his life. The director, Rufus Norris, and designer Vicki Mortimer, have given him an empty stage decorated only with hospital curtains which stand in for nearly all furniture, and hospital beds which are put to many uses, not all of them beds. But innovative use of projections and film and choreography fill in all the gaps.

And what a busy play this is, taking in a lifetime of incident, personal and political, in a country recovering slowly from war and social turmoil, through scene after scene, from schoolroom to Parliament, without actually losing us along the way. The enormous cast is wondrously marshalled, even taking part in a fullscale song and dance number, and doubling and tripling roles without confusion.

Nye is a fine achievement.

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