Michael Sheen’s pious portrait of the founder of the NHS needs... MAJOR SURGERY
AS ONE of his farewell gifts in his final year as Artistic Director of the National Theatre, Rufus Norris has bequeathed us a fervent, pious and ingratiating portrait of Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan, starring Michael Sheen.
Bevan was the garrulous Welsh politician famed (and sometimes cursed) for creating the NHS in 1948. In short, a Labour Party saint. Still, if I were him, I’m not sure I’d be too flattered by Tim Price’s play, Nye. It paints the member for Ebbw Vale as slightly sappy and dull. You’d never guess he was an avid womaniser and keen amateur pig farmer.
His life story is told as a hallucination from his deathbed in hospital, under the influence of morphine.
Yet somehow, Price’s play — and Norris’s production — fails to exploit the bitter irony of his perishing in a hospital system of his own design.
This is partially suggested by Vicki Mortimer’s dreamlike set of mushy-pea-coloured hospital curtains acting as veils of consciousness. At one point they’re lowered to create the benches in the House of Commons — with patients and staff doubling up as Bevan’s friends and enemies.
The content of Bevan’s dreams, though, are chaste visions of public libraries and early bureaucratic triumphs at Tredegar local council.
Yes, he’s haunted by the terrible sound of his father fighting for breath as he dies of miners’ ‘black lung’ disease. And there’s a Science Museum- style laser show when he goes down a mine with his old man.
But Price is so keen to beatify Bevan that his exemplary life passes almost unopposed.
The most stick Bevan gets is from Winston Churchill (Tony Jayawardena) who tells him off for tabling a no-confidence vote during the war.
And there’s a bit of bother with Bea Holland as Clement Attlee, enthroned on a desk and bumpercar combo ( complete with motor) that makes the post-war PM look like Doctor Who’s nemesis Davros. He even demands to know: ‘Where are the doctors?’
As Bevan’s fiery Scottish wifetobe, Jennie Lee, Sharon Small’s only act of defiance is to contest the cheap suit chosen by Nye’s mother. Thereafter she’s reduced to a kind of ‘Stabat Mater’ — Jesus’s mother Mary at the foot of the cross — except here at the foot of a hospital bed.
She boasts of abandoning her career as an MP for the man she calls ‘the best chance socialism ever had in this country’ — a dismal epitaph on Labour’s legacy.
Looking like Mike Yarwood, Sheen sports stripy pyjamas and a vigorous grey barnet. He lends Nye a slightly bleary smile, but his propensity for righteous speechifying doesn’t endear him to the audience: it’s too easy for him, and too transparent for us.
Pushing through the foundation of the NHS should have been the play’s dramatic focus. It was, as Attlee tells him, a mission impossible: ‘Get the most conservative profession in the country to accept our most socialist programme.’
That titanic achievement has to wait until near the end of the two-hour, 40-minute journey when Sheen is confronted by a projection of doctors in surgical masks — effectively, a Zoom consultation with angry AI avatars. Could this be the shape of an NHS (and live theatre) to come?
ROUGHLY around the same time that Bevan was trying to get the NHS on its feet, the cantankerous composer Benjamin Britten was trying to create an opera for the coronation of Elizabeth II.
Britten’s music is often a dissonant assault on the ear. He was a fickle friend who had dubious relationships with choirboys.
And yet there is nothing that the love of a good woman can’t fix in Ben And Imo, Mark Ravenhill’s two-person play which premiered on Radio Three in 2013.
The woman in question was Imogen Holst, the daughter of another English composer, Gustav Holst.
She pitches up in Britten’s Aldeburgh home to help him finish his opera, Gloriana. But between his homosexuality, and her settled spinsterdom, the only thing at stake is the seldom performed opera, all but disowned by the composer himself.
Even so, director Erica Whyman’s playful and finely tuned production creates a sympathetic portrait of an intense and unlikely friendship.
Victoria Yeates’s Imo is a cheerfully unpaid shrink, nanny, big sister, alter ego and chef.
Samuel Barnett’s petulant Benjamin Britten is a tortured, self-pitying neurotic who suffers psychosomatic shoulder pain when composing.
Luckily, Imo believed ‘composers are the most fascinating things that ever lived’. And her faith gets us over the line.