Theatre review: Nye

The second major show about the founding of the National Health Service currently playing in London, Tim Price's Nye ends up pretty much where Lucy Kirkwood's The Human Body began: With the NHS about to be born out of a seemingly impossible, looming deadline, and Britain's doctors only at the last minute putting their voices behind this complete shakeup of their profession. In fact the play seems to squeeze this major event in with almost as much urgency, serving at it does predominantly as a broader biography of the Welsh politician whose brainchild the service was, and who pushed it through opposition from all sides. We meet Aneurin Bevan (The Actor Michael Sheen) in need of the service himself, on his deathbed - though he doesn't know that - on an NHS hospital ward.

Routine ulcer surgery has discovered an aggressive stomach cancer, but his wife Jennie Lee (Sharon Small) has asked that he not be told of it yet. But with his pain levels necessitating a large dose of morphine, he lapses into fevered dreams he may never wake up from.

So he revisits his life, sort-of but not-quite in chronological order, beginning with his childhood in Tredegar where his miner father is slowly and painfully dying of Black Lung. He grows up to follow in his father's footsteps but when his and his friends' activism gets them blacklisted and unemployed for months or years at a time, he galvanizes them into running for local office, upsetting the existing order that’s seen the mining company control everything about the region for years. From there on the next step is national politics, and when he’s elected as a Labour MP he quickly becomes a thorn in the side not only of the Tory government, but also of traditionalists within his own party with his outspoken attacks on systemic unfairness.

Rufus Norris’ production is enjoyable but uneven – Price uses the conceit of this being an extended, vivid morphine dream to jump around Bevan’s life and achievements, The Actor Michael Sheen spending the whole evening in pyjamas as he revisits and relives important moments. But it does also seem like the writer’s been over-reliant on this leap into the surreal, hoping it’ll cover up the gaps in the storytelling. I’m not convinced it does: His relationship with Lee in particular feels like it’s been an afterthought, and scenes at the hospital bedside where she and Nye’s lifelong friend Archie (Roger Evans) argue about Bevan and Lee’s eccentric marriage (essentially an open marriage without them ever acknowledging it as such, with both having numerous affairs the other was fine with) seem like a late addition to deal with this. It’s odd, apart from an initial parliamentary meet-cute, to have a relationship story told largely without the people in it being in the same scene.

Vicki Mortimer’s set, which is essentially a green hospital ward with low strip lighting that expands into this dreamscape, is also an odd choice for the Olivier stage, and probably designed partly with the fact that it’s going to transfer to Cardiff in mind: From the cheap seats at the front of the stalls the view was fine, but I did wonder if the audience at the back of the circle would feel like they were watching the action through a letterbox. I kept expecting an Angels In America-style explosion into the full vast space but it never came.

On the other hand the well-cast ensemble are putting in energetic and varied work throughout. I like to think the casting of Tony Jayawardena as Winston Churchill wasn’t colour-blind, and was a conscious attempt to make the old racist spin so energetically in his grave he’d have drilled halfway to Australia by the interval. Stephanie Jacob plays Clement Attlee sitting at a desk that propels itself around the stage in random directions like she’s Davros. Actually I did wonder at times exactly what kind of Doctor the production thought it was dealing with, especially when costumer designer Kinnetia Isidore puts the lanky Ross Foley in a tweed jacket and bowtie, presumably for the benefit of anyone who didn’t think he looked enough like Matt Smith already.

With the ensemble breaking into occasional movement sequences (choreographed by Steven Hoggett and Jess Williams) in the background, Nye’s encounters with the British Medical Association featuring video of giant heads in surgical masks looming down on him, and one full-scale musical number, Nye is too surreal to be a straightforward biography, not quite surreal enough to be A Welsh Fantasia on National (Health Service) Themes. With the actual launch of the NHS being dealt with in the long play’s last 20 minutes, this couldn’t be accused of reducing Bevan to just the one thing he’s remembered for, but while The Actor Michael Sheen brings charm I don’t know that we get much insight. Hard to fault as entertainment, I couldn’t help thinking that as a story Nye’s more eccentric touches are largely papering over its clumsier elements.

Nye by Tim Price is booking until the 11th of May at the National Theatre’s Olivier; and from the 18th of May to the 1st of June at the Wales Millennium Centre’s Donald Gordon Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.