A MAVERICK MINISTER
There’s another play to be written about Aneurin Bevan, stubborn founder of the National Health Service: perhaps a more contentious one, or a fantasy in which the grit-hard, down-to-earth workaholic Welsh firebrand comes back as a ghost ,to confront the bureaucratic absurdities and clumsy scandals of the 21c giant. But Tim Price’s play could never be that: the NHS right now feels too precious, too fragile, and the only treatment of Bevan had to be affectionately hagiographic. Which means that we got an enjoyable play which asks and answers no questions beyond the fact that as Bevan said, universal free healthcare was the most civilized idea a nation could have.
Michael Sheen was obvious casting – currently another of his hairy, furiously-Anglohobe- Welsh-hero roles is running on BBC1, entertainingly enraging the Daily Mail critic. Here he deploys his familiar magnetic watchability, no small achievement when wearing a colourful pyjama suit throughout. For we meet “Nye” first in hospital, not yet knowing that he is dying, tended fondly by adoring nurses and his wife Jennie Lee (Sharon Small is wonderful, and I next want a whole play about her spell as Arts minister). Around him the hospital-green curtains of Vicki Mortimer’s clever design rise and fall, to be everything from childhood to the Commons and a coalmine. We see him struggling in school against his stammer, falling on the device of changing words to avoid hard consonants; thrilled by a free library, rebuked for spending too litttle time with his own dying father, and earlier being taken down the mine to see the marvel of a seam (this is beautifully staged, mysterious, deeply respectful of that grim old trade).
We see him as a troublemaker in the wartime Parliament, roaring at the despised Winston Churchill, persuaded only with difficulty to join the “truce” with an Aye vote, to get America in by displaying commie-free British unity. The best moments are his interactions with Clement Attlee (Stephanie Jacob) whose elusive genius is wittily shown as he glides around on a desk or suddenlly appears at the top of a pyramid. A wrestling-match with the reluctant Herbert Morrison is fun too. And Mortimer and director Rufus Norris give us two wonderful coups de theatre with projection: once when `Nye sees and hears illimitable crowds of anxious patients reaching out, then again when a phalanx of masked doctors defies him. Thir resistance to becoming a state employee featured strongly in the recent The Human Body (scroll down for Donmar review). It is well done here, albeit without the sympathy the earlier play briefly allowed it by reminding us that many – not all – of those doctors already ran highly philanthropic services for their local poor, and that it was state control that worried them.
Interestingly, Price does not use two of Bevan’s most familiar quotes at all: “we stuffed their mouths with gold” about consultants, or the one about Tories being lower than vermin. Having looked those two lines up to check, I notice that there are pages more of fantastic, rude, furious Bevan rhetoric he could also have used. Maybe another time. Or give Sheen a one man show, in proper clothes, to deliver them all. I’d go.
But for now, it’s a workmanlike history play at a time of anxiety about the great service itself. In the final moments the dying man is embraced and lifted by doctors and nurses towards his father’s miner’s lamp, and then statistics come up to remind us how fast mortality declined after the NHS was born.
nationaltheatre.org.uk. to 11 may.
Then Wales Millenium Centre 18 May-1 June
Rating 3
theatreCat 