'Nye' review — Michael Sheen returns as visionary national treasure Aneurin Bevan, founding father of the NHS

Read our review of Tim Price's play Nye, directed by Rufus Norris, now in performances at the National Theatre to 16 August.

In the year since Michael Sheen last took to the stage in only a pair of red striped pyjamas to play Welsh national treasure and founding father of the NHS Aneurin "Nye" Bevan, the actor has cemented his own reputation as a national treasure and founding father, announcing a new Welsh National Theatre which he will helm as artistic director. You could say this revival of Tim Price’s play, directed by the National Theatre’s outgoing artistic director Rufus Norris, marks the beginning of Sheen’s recommitment to the stage.

Sheen’s Bevan is jovial, charming and full of wide-eyed wonder, but calmly unwavering in his vision for a free, fair national health service available to all. It’s a stirring performance in a drama that has a tendency to romanticise the NHS without offering or inspiring a sufficient rallying cry to save it.

Price’s sweeping story imagines Bevan, slowly dying in a hospital bed in 1960, slipping through hallucinations into formative moments from his past. From the darkened edges of the stage, compact memories slide into focus, often carrying an ensemble cast with them. We watch Bevan standing up to a tough school master who caned him for his speech impediment, then find him overcoming his stammer through books in a library – it’s here his enthusiasm for free public services is also sparked.

Through fragmented snapshots, we see Bevan becoming an advocate for his hometown of Tredegar, then the MP for Ebbw Vale, and eventually meeting his future wife Jenny Lee (a wonderfully fierce Sharon Small), herself a socialist and MP. Sheen’s pyjamas are as jarring a sight as he woos Jenny as they are when he stands up for the voiceless majority in a courtroom, but fit the vaguely sinister, nightmarish essence that also sees a draconian Churchill (Tony Jayawardena) appear from the gloom and attempt to sweet-talk Bevan, and a tight-lipped Clement Attlee (Stephanie Jacob, in a balding cap) glide onto stage on a freewheeling desk, offering him his all-important role as health and housing minister in Labour’s post-war government.

It’s in the second half that the story truly takes hold, and through a pair of moving scenes, both aided by Jon Driscoll’s striking projection designs, we witness those in desperate need of medical attention come forward to be counted, and Bevan negotiate with a menacing-looking body of doctors, bartering until the majority agree with nationalising their profession.

Everything about Vicki Mortimer’s set is slick, from hospital curtains that double up as theatre curtains – closing on one scene and reopening to reveal an entirely new one – to the agile hospital beds behind them that even appear to dance as Sheen’s Bevan breaks into song in a scene that seems to belong to another production.

There’s terrific mise-en-scène throughout – from Bevan’s miner father (Rhodri Meilir) dying of ‘black lung’ on a spot-lit bed, to the ensemble moving in unison as cabinet ministers, librarians and schoolchildren – but making the production this self-consciously stylised comes at the expense of a grit that could infuse the story with a sense of urgency. It's bittersweet watching Bevan’s fight to bring the NHS into being at a time when years of cuts have left it crumbling, and when its heyday can already be looked back on as something of a fever dream.

Nye is at the National Theatre to 16 August. Book Nye tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk.

Photo credit: Nye (Photos by Johan Persson)