Nye with Michael Sheen at the National Theatre – review

The centrepiece of Danny Boyle’s uplifting opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics was a whirling dance routine celebrating Britain’s proudest post-war achievement – the creation of the National Health Service on 5 July 1948.

On the stages of the National Theatre, Tim Price’s sprawling new play Nye attempts to do something similar, as it tells the story of the Labour politician Aneurin “Nye” Bevan, begetter and midwife of the NHS, and explains the principles and conditions that drove him to surmount fierce opposition to “look after everyone.”

A co-production with the Wales Millennium Centre it features a central performance from Michael Sheen of charm and charisma, and an energetic and stylish production from Rufus Norris, the National’s outgoing artistic director. It’s engaging, never less than interesting, but it doesn’t always find the balance between great gobbets of historical information and reaching the heart of the man and his vision.

Described as a ‘fantasia’ (dread word), it opens with Nye on his death bed in 1960 in one of the hospitals he has helped to build. His wife, the formidable MP Jennie Lee (Sharon Small), has decided not to tell him he is dying; his best friend Archie (Roger Evans) is distraught. A kindly nurse, who has been inspired by him, gives him morphine.

As he slips into unconsciousness, the play takes us into his memories of his life in from his birth in Tredegar, in South Wales, through being bullied for his stammer by a cruel teacher and escaping caning thanks to the power of collective action, to nursing his miner father dying of ‘black lung’, discovering books and the effectiveness of union organisation, becoming a firebrand in parliament as MP for Ebbw Vale, meeting Lee and taking on Churchill (given silky, stately life by Tony Jayawardena).

The scenes are staged with remarkable fluidity and wit, with Vicki Mortimer’s clever design turning the green curtains and metal beds of the hospital ward into other worlds; in one scene the drapes become the green benches of the Houses of Parliament, in another the beds (complete with patients) tilt into the setting for a council meeting. A strong cast provide a frame for the narrative, moving through stylised scenes choreographed by Steven Hoggett and Jess Williams, sometimes carrying Sheen through the action and sometimes reacting to what is said.

At one point, in this phantasmagorical mishmash, as in Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective (also, incidentally, a tribute to the collective decency of the NHS), they break into a song and dance routine – “C’mon Get Happy”. At another, Nye finds himself alone in the dark down the mine with his father, finding the seams of coal that Paule Constable’s clever lighting twinkles into being, in a line that mimics the heartbeat on Nye’s bedside monitor.

So much is packed in, that in the end the landslide election of the postwar Labour government, and the actual founding of the NHS despite the vested interests of the doctors – represented on giant video screens as a masked black and white army – is crammed into a few short scenes. Characters such as Lee or Bevan’s sister Arianwen (Kezrena James) feel under-explored; Clement Atlee (Stephanie Jacob in a slightly scary bald skull cap) is reduced to a joke about a moving desk.

But Sheen’s Nye holds the centre. He potters through the action in his red pyjamas and overly-combed hair, looking like a portly prophet, inspiring by the power of his belief. It’s a nuanced performance that finds the sense of inferiority lying behind the confident exterior, but also the emotion that propelled Bevan forward.

With him in position, there’s no denying the play’s essential liveliness, or the passion that drives it, as it points the moral of Bevan’s belief in making a fairer, better society for all, or his determination – in the face of enormous odds – that building a new, better and more inclusive world was in fact possible.