‘Nye’ at the National Theatre, or — Health over Wealth?
Writers sometimes get told that using drugs as a story-telling device to investigate a character’s life via surrealist imagery can be a bit of an easy cop-out but for Tim Prices’ play ‘Nye’ it not only doesn’t feel lazy but appropriately fitting as we see a bed-ridden Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan confronting his own mortality and looking back over his life in a morphine induced haze in a hospital that he helped to build.
And ‘Nye’ packs in a lot (maybe TOO much) as the Welsh Socialist fights for miner’s rights, challenges private dominance in local government, grieves over his father’s painful death from black lung, falls in love, calls out Churchill’s wartime mistakes, takes on the doctor’s union and, ultimately, creates the National Health Service. Clever set-design, atmospheric lighting, nuanced sound design, clear direction and powerhouse acting present all this in a chronologically fractured, yet never confusing, fever-dream. The result is highly stimulating and deeply moving.
Yet for all the personal biography Price’s work comes across more as an impassioned call not just for universal health care but also a direct attack on the hording of private wealth at the expense of society. Thatcher was fundamentally wrong — we are not a society of individuals. Human beings are social creatures and rampant self-interest, ironically, ultimately destroys the “self”. We NEED others which, is why it is vitally important to care. Either that or you can make your money, horde it, see your public services collapse around you and then blame the marginalised for your own destructive avarice.
By highlighting the seemingly insurmountable obstacles Bevan had to overcome ‘Nye’ is a jolt to the audience as we realise that if the NHS hadn’t been created when it was then it might never have existed at all, and even back then it was something of a miracle (do you really think those in power would give up so much today?). Thank god it happened when it did! It also had to come about quickly, immediately and in one go before it could be watered down, diluted or compromised.
Michael Sheen is, not surprisingly, excellent as Nye Bevan and is a perfect fit (he is playing a Welsh Socialist, after all) with the rest of the cast being equally as strong, although Jon Furlong’s “deputy Prime Minster” almost steals the show.
There’s also a surprising amount of humour and the fluid, fast pace means ‘Nye’ is never in danger of becoming dry for a second. It’s also frequently touching and moving and I won’t pretend I didn’t have a lump in my throat by the end. But ‘Nye’ is touching by its very nature as this is all about treating other human beings with dignity and how the most important thing in life is the time you get to spend with those you love. And, sometimes, even with those you don’t.
‘Nye’ is both timely and timeless as after the pandemic, some seemingly irreversible shifts to the right, the continuing concentration of wealth by those at the top and the demonization of the left ‘Nye’ feels less like a nostalgic lamentation for a more socially caring by-gone era and more an intensely moving wake-up call that things can always be changed.
Look what we can do! It’s enough to bring a tear to the eye.
