Nye: A surreal journey into the creation of the NHS

I‘ll be honest, I booked tickets to see Nye with slight apprehension. A play about the NHS? Not exactly my normal topic of choice when I go to the theatre. I had worried I would find it dry. Perhaps even that I wasn’t the target audience, instead leaning itself to an older crowd. However, I walked out of the theatre knowing how incredibly wrong I was. It is one of the best plays I have seen.

Nye stars the lovely Michael Sheen, who takes on the role of Aneurin Bevan (“Nye”): a Welshman, Labour Party politician, and the reason we have the National Health Service today. The cast is large and predominantly Welsh, and it seems only fitting that, whilst it was premiered at the Olivier Theatre in the National Theatre, the run ended in the Wales Millennium Centre. Sheen is a delight to watch, and the rest of the cast are brilliant also.

Michael Sheen looks almost childlike on the stage, wearing a pair of pyjamas throughout the whole performance

The play begins at the end of Nye’s life. Nye lies in a hospital bed, slowly nearing his death as the play progresses. The setting flickers back and forth between scenes of him in the hospital, and scenes which follow him through a morphine-induced hallucination of his life from childhood to the creation of the NHS.

The audience is reminded of how Winston Churchill, played brilliantly by Tony Jayawardena, personally voted against the National Health Service twenty-one times, a statement which is contrasted by the play’s depiction of the immense need for such a system. After Nye is given the role of Minister for Health and Housing, he is met with an extortionate number of individuals begging him to help, desperate for decent, available treatment and better conditions within hospitals. The failure to provide this under the pre-existing structure is apparent. We need a new system: the National Health Service.

It is safe to say that the play was a triumph

Michael Sheen looks almost childlike on the stage, wearing a pair of pyjamas throughout the whole performance while he is met with the nation’s doctors. Their presence is overwhelming as they stare down at him from a large screen above and declare their resistance to the NHS. The play’s emotional climax shows Nye’s insistence, announcing the launch of the NHS “with or without the doctors”. With a number of compromises, he gains their support, the doctors slowly stepping forward until all support him. I’ll confess that as the final doctor joined Nye, I found myself tearing up. It was a truly heart-warming moment. The play closes with Nye dying, using his final words to ask, “did I look after everyone?”, and you could see the vigorous nodding of heads in the audience in answer to this.

It is safe to say that the play was a triumph. Written by Tim Price and directed by Rufus Norris, it is both comedic and incredibly moving. The choice to present the majority of the production in a sort of surreal landscape within Bevan’s mind worked well, and I found myself delightfully surprised with the ways this was shown, most notably the musical number that occurs.

When, a few weeks after seeing Nye, the general election was announced, my first general election at that, I know I could not have chosen a better time to have seen it. The importance of the NHS is clear, and so is the current Government’s undervaluing of it. As we look towards the July 4 and the predictions of a Labour majority, I find myself hopeful, just as I found myself during the play’s conclusion.