Theatreguide.London
www.theatreguide.london

Follow @theatreguidelon

 The Theatreguide.London Review

In March 2020 the covid-19 epidemic forced the closure of all British theatres. Some companies adapted by putting archive recordings of past productions online, others by streaming new shows, and various online archives preserve still more vintage productions. Even as things return to normal we continue to review the experience of watching live theatre onscreen.

Nye
National Theatre At Home   Autumn 2024

Tim Price's play about Aneurin ('Nye') Bevan, British politician and 'father' of the National Health Service, played in the National Theatre's Lyttelton in the summer of 2024 and has been recorded for online showing in the National Theatre At Home stream.

The play does everything we ask of historical and biographical drama. It offers an easy-to-digest history lesson, it imagines personalities and interactions for the participants that make them come alive, and it makes interesting and absorbing theatre.

If it stumbles at all, it is in the one thing very few historical plays can achieve, creating suspense or forward momentum when we know the story's ending is determined, even if we don't know the details.

We meet Bevan (Michael Sheen, almost totally unrecognisable under extra weight and ageing affects) on his deathbed, as his life is played out through flashbacks. Son of a Welsh miner, he early discovered both a commitment to helping others and the power of group action.

A particularly delightful early scene shows the boy Nye discovering the wonders of a free public library, while another has the adult Socialist leading a group who take over the corrupt town council just by knowing the regulations and by-laws better than the entrenched powers.

(On the other hand, a vaguely mystical scene in which Nye's miner father takes the boy into a pit to show him the beauty some miners find in their occupation doesn't quite work, nor does a later filmed sequence giving the adult Nye a nightmare vision of poor Britons deprived of medical care.)

The play also takes note of Bevan's bullheaded tendancy to see issues in simple terms that make him unable to comprehend how anyone could possibly disagree, making him one of the least politic politicians ever.

When Clement Atlee's post-WW2 government tried to put him someplace where he couldn't cause much trouble as Minister For Health And Housing, Bevan came up with the idea of a tax-supported free-to-user health service, and the play makes that as much an extension of his equal-opportunity-for-all Socialism as a medical concern.

And the closest the play comes to suspense is watching Bevan's irascible personality managing to alienate almost everyone, from the medical establishment to his parliamentary colleagues, almost stifling the NHS before it was born.

That all this works as a play is largely to the separate credits of the playwright and director Rufus Norris. Tim Price's device of framing the narrative in the free association of morphine-induced dreams not only creates a fluid movement from episode to episode, but allows the audience to make thematic and characterising connections.

The determination that allowed the young boy to overcome a crippling stammer has, we sense, something to do with the 'Anyone who disagrees with me is wrong' determination of the man. The guilty memory of being unable as a child to cope with his father's illness and death helped drive his determination to provide good medical care for all.

And the slightly ridiculous picture of the young Socialist taking on the whole world prepares us for later scenes of Bevan being rude to Chamberlain, Churchill, Atlee and the entire medical establishment, usually when he needed them most, completely blind to the ways he's sabotaging himself.

The director sets the whole play in a bright and clean NHS hospital ward, with the efficient ins and outs of medical staff morphing into scene changes, and hospital beds turning into the furniture of offices or the House of Commons and back again.

Onstage almost continuously, Michael Sheen immerses himself so completely in the character that, as I said, you may not recognise him. He catches the many sides of the man, adding a central innocence and naivete that keep the man sympathetic even when he's abusing others or shooting himself in the foot.

A large supporting cast, many playing three or four characters, are led by Sharon Small as Nye's often exasperated but always loyal wife and Roger Evans as a lifelong friend.

Gerald Berkowitz

( We reviewed the play onstage HERE )