Olivier Theatre, National Theatre. 2 hr 40 min, including a 20 min interval.
Front row seats, £25 each due to "restricted view".
19 July 2025
I went to see Nye with my mum. I had not heard anything about it, other than from a friend who said that she also went to see it with her mum. My friend said she thought it was okay, but that her mum had loved it.
Nye depicts the life of Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan, in a brilliant performance by Michael Sheen. Sheen passed me under the colonnades in Westminster Palace a few months previously, a presence I found confusing at the time, but now makes complete sense.
Admitted to hospital, the story flickers back and forth through Nye's memories, charting his rise from stuttering school boy, to local politician in Monmouthshire, to health and housing secretary under Clement Atlee.
We witness Nye's friendship with Archie Lush (Jason Hughes) and his marriage to Jennie Lee, (Sharon Small). His memories are both illuminated and plagued by interactions with his father, a coal miner who died of pneumoconiosis, a lung condition caused by inhaling coal dust.
My favourite parts of this show were the playfulness; Nye digresses into his childhood memories and the actors become their childselves. Sheen and Hughes are boys overcoming Nye's stutter and discovering library books.
In an equally surreal, playful fashion, the elements of the design are shuffled and exaggerated, as they often are in ones memories. Nye's cane-loving school teacher is armed with two ridiculously tall canes, giving the appearance of a tarantula in Nye's subconscious.
Later, Clement Atlee's desk is driven around as a go kart, swivelling to face Nye as he paces back and forth across the stage. Such simple choices bring to life otherwise dead, dialogue schemes and pepper them with good humour.
The dynamic, green hospital curtains reframe each scene: they hang to depict a hospital and fall to become the Common's green benches, before regressing to leave the stage vast, vacant and dark when Nye and his father enter the cavernous mines. The same curtains also rise to bear projections of the faceless doctors Nye must negotiate with to implement his vision for the NHS. The hospital beds are just as dynamic.
Elements I didn't fancy as much: the sometimes overbearing use of classical music to intensify emotions already present, and the story squashed into the second half. The first half was full, well paced, and gluttoned by material to set up Nye's background. The second half addressed Nye's parliamentary career and success in building the NHS. It felt as though both a technical and a narrative problem combined to result in the weak latter half: (1) as standard with most writing, the earlier material is more heavily revised and therefore stronger, (2) how to make health policy interesting, particularly in comparison to such a rich personal life, other than to brush over it in broad strokes? Price did not delve too deep, or perhaps just did not have as much material. Particularly, the negotiations with doctors not in favour of the NHS felt humorous, but rushed.
Similarly, the Nye's politics in the play as a whole were oversimplified. He became a generally left wing/progressive/Trade Unionist/socialist/populist, for people and against profit, without much discussion or nuance. It works for a liberal audience at the National, but felt simplistic at times.
The play was structured around Nye's entrance to the newly formed NHS hospital, and concludes with his death, on NHS care that he created, surrounded by his committed best friend and his wife Jennie. After the lights went out, the woman sat beside me whispered to her boyfriend that Nye's "death was just so reminiscent of Dad's death". My mum too, had tears in her eyes. I wonder if this sadness was not only the generic sadness one experiences when watching a stage death, but if this play brought forth the particular tears of older women who, like Jennie, gave up so much for their marriages, only to watch their husband die before them.
For Nye, it makes sense that the creator of the NHS holds a candle in the hearts of London's audiences. Given the uncertainty coming from our right flank this year, I'm pleased to have seen this version of Nye's story. It's an important reminder of the success of nationalisation, and the ever present fight for fair treatment of our working classes. Our divided left wing are in dire need of a staunch figurehead like Nye.
