Tim Price’s play Nye, in co-production with Wales Millennium Centre, opened in London and Cardiff earlier this year to critical acclaim. Michael Sheen plays the legendary Welsh socialist in a spectacular telling of a life and politics which gave rise to the NHS. Author Rhian E Jones gives her own take on Nye and its relationship to the Labour party of today.
In a speech to the 1949 Labour Party conference as Minister for Health and Housing, Aneurin Bevan claimed: “The language of priorities is the religion of socialism”. Within Labour party mythology, Bevan and the NHS have developed a semi-sacred status which doesn’t always match up to how their legacies are treated.
Seventy-six years after its creation, the NHS has become second nature to us, part of the social fabric like stained and faded wallpaper, and something so often taken for granted that it can be hard to imagine the dire conditions it replaced. Tim Price’s biographical play Nye examines these circumstances, the personal and political beliefs that drove Bevan to improve them, and the vested interests he struggled against to do so.
The play is billed as “surreal and spectacular” and a “Welsh fantasia”, which sounds like a tall order to construct from Bevan’s origins in the grim Welsh Valleys and the sepia bureaucracy of the Attlee government’s transformative project. The production manages it with a light, sometimes usefully irreverent or absurdist touch, and Michael Sheen is, as always, uncannily good in the title role, capturing Bevan’s already larger-than-life persona under an approximation of his trademark lustrous hair.
We see Bevan first – and last – as an NHS patient, attaining human dimensions while cradled in his own creation. In between scenes from the present, we are swept back to his formative years in Tredegar, as coalminer then miner’s agent, son of an ailing father and brother of his overburdened sister Arianwen, and hesitant schoolboy struggling with his stammer. In an exhilarating highlight, his schoolfriend Archie Lush helps him discover the power of words through a visit to Tredegar library – its wealth of knowledge free at the point of use an obvious political foreshadowing, as well as demonstrating Bevan’s personal journey towards his later rhetorical skill.
The importance of reading, discussion and self-education is a constant theme, as Bevan and his Tredegar comrades make the leap from reading-group Marxist theory to praxis via industrial organising. They become local councillors, using civic society’s institutions as a counterweight to the bosses’ power, and Bevan is launched on his journey to Westminster and his grenade-throwing interventions with both the Tories and the right of his own party.
Many of the parliamentary conflicts spotlighted in Nye still have bleak relevance today, particularly a government “cocooned in privilege” choosing bank bailouts for the rich alongside cuts in welfare for the poorest. Bevan more than once denounces the entirety of Westminster politics as a “privateering racket”, although the play omits his still-resonant excoriation of the Conservative Party in 1948 as “lower than vermin”. Perhaps understandably for narrative convenience, Labour’s own internecine battles in these years are somewhat backgrounded, restricted to Bevan’s interactions with the subtly strategic Clement Attlee and New Labour’s harbinger Herbert Morrison, played with effective dislikeableness by Jon Furlong.
Sheen’s Bevan is haunted by the spectre of his dying father, his body wrecked by the physical demands of coalmining, and his impetus to “look after everyone” is presented almost as a political solution to a tragedy felt personally. But this is a wider theme of the play: as Minister for Health, Bevan is assailed by personal horror stories of the country’s two-tier healthcare system, intertwined with their political roots in poverty and social inequality. Faced with the scale of the problem, a solution has to be sweeping, fast and bold – the “one true blow” that his father describes as the hallmark of the good coalminer. His experience of Tredegar Medical Association provides a blueprint for scaled-up localism to a centrally-funded universal service.
In the tense run-up to his showdown with both Churchill and the British Medical Association, defending healthcare’s status quo, Bevan’s determination to “break the union” of the BMA is played for laughs, its incongruity as a strategy dismissed as “they’re middle-class – it’s fine”. This comes after an earlier conversation with Churchill – a delicately imposing performance by Tony Jayawardena – where Bevan accepts the inevitability of compromise as the price of political success, hinting at future developments like his rescinding of support for unilateral nuclear disarmament at the 1957 Labour conference. But these nagging anxieties only lurk in the margins of the play’s heroic narrative. While Nye tends to underplay Bevan’s canniness and occasional ruthlessness as a political operator, his meet-cute with his wife-to-be, the Independent Labour Party MP Jennie Lee, sees her describe him as “steamrollering”, and this is indeed what we see him do, from courtship to political opposition.
Lee, played with tightly-wound self-possession by Sharon Small, reappears in the play’s present alongside Lush, Bevan’s election agent and lifelong friend, their suppressed conflict and rivalry finally bursting its banks as they both stand vigil at Nye’s bedside. Her appointment as Minister for the Arts and founder of the Open University are yet to come, and her current frustrations and dissatisfactions, glimpsed around the edges of her husband’s story, are a reminder of the personal and professional sacrifices made by women for political causes, as is his sister Arianwen’s one-woman domestic psychodrama.
As Nye mixes affection and pride in the NHS with a defensive anger at its opponents, it’s instructive to compare current Labour health policy with Bevan’s goals. The Tories have of course remained dogged enemies or at best sceptics of the NHS from its inception, but the Blair government also made steps towards its destabilisation through the Private Finance Initiative as part of its overt turn away from socialism. As with the Post Office and railways among other public services, the NHS’s ability to function as intended has been persistently undermined by a dogmatic pursuit of privatisation, despite its visibly destructive results.
Under the new government of Keir Starmer, this danger remains live. As Shadow Health Secretary, Wes Streeting proclaimed that “only Labour can be trusted to reform the NHS”, but also made it clear that this reform would be focused on increased use of the private sector. By accident or design, this ignores one of Bevan’s key lessons, illustrated in Nye, on the importance of universalism, instead of two-tier systems, as political leverage as well as moral principle. The Starmer prescription for change seems to be a sly and shabby continuation of the Tories’ death by a thousand cuts rather than anything approaching Bevan’s visionary boldness.
By contrast, Nye effectively showcases what contemporary politics badly needs an injection of: a genuine transformative vision informed by working-class experience of disadvantage and the potential, will and opportunity to do something about it.
Rhian E Jones is the co-editor of Red Pepper Magazine
