Worth: $15.00
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Cast:
Michael Sheen, Tony Jayawardena, Sharon Small, Roger Evans
Intro:
Pulling it all together and giving it wings is partly down to the skill of Sheen and he, as always, fully rises to the challenge.
The National Theatre Live (NT Live) is truly splendid. As the pre-play puff piece tells us, the series which began as a little experiment over ten years ago has now reached 11 million viewers worldwide. This one, about the great British reformer Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan, is NT Live’s 100th broadcast.
Big numbers are implicit within the show too, as it is about the provision of thousands of state-run hospitals to serve the British population of (then) 50 million. The National Health Service is a bit of a ‘treasure’ in the UK (and of course the model for the Australian system to some extent). During/after Covid, people stood in the streets to applaud the NHS nurses and doctors. Perhaps it is not surprising then that this dramatisation of Bevan’s life should occasionally veer off towards hagiography. Attempts to show his contradictions and his failures of judgement are massively outweighed by the general sense of optimism and gratitude for his vision.
Michael Sheen, who is Welsh like Bevan, is more or less born to play this part and he takes to it with relish. He is in every scene, in this long play, and he gets both the look (possibly a wig and a bit of a fat suit required) and the voice to a tee.
Bevan was a bit of an unlikely politician in some ways, as the first half makes clear in sketching out his early life. The son of a Welsh coal miner – who of course died of black lung – Bevan was more or less self-educated and rose from local politician to the national cabinet because he was the right person at the right time. It is grudgingly admitted that Churchill was the best leader for the crisis of the war years, but Bevan always despised his patrician politics and the conservative party as a whole.
Some of the best and most astute scenes in the play are the exchanges between Bevan and Churchill (a great supporting perf from Tony Jayawardena). When Labour got in by a landslide straight after the war, the government had the confidence and political capital to repay the populace with a national health service free to all at the point of need. This was a radical socialistic idea at the time and certainly not popular with all-powerful doctors who were mostly opposed. The doctors are portrayed here as ghoulish avatars in the play’s rare use of multimedia projection.
Nye uses the largest stage at the National Theatre to orchestrate the sweep of history whilst keeping it understandable and personal. The conceit is that Bevan, in his last days, is himself in hospital being looked after by grateful nurses with flashbacks to scenes from his childhood and youth and his parliamentary victories. His wife Jenny Lee (Sharon Small) was a politician herself, but is here presented as taking a reluctant back seat to Nye, who she sees as the best chance for advancing the socialist cause. The other principal side character is Archie (Roger Evans), Bevans’ childhood friend who sticks with him till the very end.
The production has verve and pace. There is a strong script courtesy of playwright Tim Price and confident directing from Rufus Norris. There is even a slightly odd song and dance routine with nurses dancing around the bed in a way that is perhaps an intentional nod to Dennis Potter’s famous sequences from The Singing Detective.
The structure of the play is not perfect, it might have integrated the themes of the two halves better. However, it is easy to follow thanks, once again, to the skilful but unobtrusive way it is filmed. The main problem that the play has is getting audiences to care about the topic and avoiding collapsing into being just about ideas and debates. Pulling it all together and giving it wings is partly down to the skill of Sheen and he, as always, fully rises to the challenge.
