Last Saturday afternoon my partner and I went to the Wales Millennium Centre (WMC) to see Nye, a new play by Tim Price about Nye Bevan (1897-1960), founder of the NHS, socialist colossus and one of the all-time Welsh greats. It was an unforgettable experience that worked on many levels – biographical, historical, political, emotional and as sheer entertainment – while also being a damning indictment of the Toryism that is systematically destroying Nye’s magnificent achievement as well as a rallying call to arms for all people of decency and principle to resist and reverse the privatising and profiteering project of the rightwing ideologues who have brought back by stealth the two-tier health service Nye Bevan despised. Therefore, in the looming shadow of a critical UK general election that is effectively the last chance to save Nye’s precious NHS, this was very much a play about the here and now and could not have been more relevant.
When the performing arts are so utterly dominated by the slick technology and pseudo-real visuals of cinema/TV, it is not a simple task for theatre to have an impact these days. The intrinsic artificiality and constraints of the stage must be somehow overcome and the problems of live acting must be tackled so that disbelief can be suspended and dialogue can feel natural rather than just a rote recitation of learned lines or shouty scenery-chewing. All these pitfalls were skilfully and imaginatively avoided by director Rufus Norris via the strategy of having just one flexible set – the hospital ward where Nye lay dying of stomach cancer at the end of his life – and by the excellent cast’s delivery of Price’s pungent and plausible script, led by Michael Sheen’s bravura performance, never out of his pyjamas, as Nye himself.
Morphine-induced flashbacks from his hospital bed succinctly told Bevan’s life story through a vivid sequence of key scenarios: teenage miner in Tredegar, trade union activist, leftwing firebrand, the general strike, Ebbw Vale MP, clashes with Churchill, marriage to Jennie Lee, fighting fascism, the post-war Labour landslide, the Attlee government and on to his fight to establish the NHS as Minister of Health. Clever choreography of beds, curtains, screens and back-projections plus telling use of sound effects and music allowed for a seamless narrative with the big ensemble cast doubling as stage hands in an ever-fluid dance that for me brought to mind the hospital scenes in The Singing Detective, the momentous 1986 BBC drama by Dennis Potter (1935-1994) – and that is indeed a compliment.
In the end there wasn’t a dry eye in the house, a reaction not summoned up by sentimentality or mawkishness or manipulation but by genuine, unalloyed sorrow: sorrow for his premature death when he had so much more work to do; sorrow for what has been done to his legacy; sorrow for what the Labour Party has become; and sorrow for what has happened to society, to Wales, and to the world. Nye gave us permission to weep because that is the appropriate and congruent response – a rare achievement for any play and another huge success in the growing catalogue of triumphs from Aberdâr’s own Tim Price.
As a postscript I must mention the fact that this very Welsh play was a joint production by England’s National Theatre and the WMC. The National Theatre of Wales (NTW), for which Price in the past wrote plays of the calibre of The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning, Candylion and Praxis Makes Perfect, is tragically no longer a participant in the production of theatrical works and has disappeared up its own fundament. Having lost their Arts Council of Wales funding, NTW limps on in name only, entirely reliant on hand-outs to pay its staff to run self-congratulatory shindigs for identity-fixated people just like them and churn out ludicrous mission statements. When will the Senedd intervene to sort out this fiasco? Answer: when we have a functioning Welsh government again instead of the comprehensively discredited Vaughan Gething’s lame-duck regime in which there seems to be only one priority: himself.