Of course plays should be seen rather than read. It’s what I used to tell my students and it still holds true. Nonetheless if, for whatever reason, you can’t see a play then reading it is probably the next best thing. And, for the record, if I see a new play I often buy the text afterwards so that I can read it and absorb it fully after the event.
Nye, at the National Theatre, with Michael Sheen as Aneurin Bevan was so successful and admired, that it returned recently for a short-run revival. Sadly, for various reasons, I didn’t see it either time although I would have liked to. Then a doctor friend told me that she and her husband, also a GP, had been so moved by Nye that they’d cried at the end. “We’ve devoted all our lives to the NHS. All our lives, Susan! ” she said, welling up even as she spoke. “And look at it now!” That clinched it. As soon as I got home I ordered the text.
Fortunately, I see so much theatre that I’m pretty good at reading a script and staging it in my head although, obviously, it can never be the same as seeing it performed. Tim Price’s play gives us Aneurin Bevan dying in a hospital bed in 1960. It’s a framing device. The morphine he’s given takes him back to a hallucinatory re-enactment of his life through which we occasionally hear the voices of his wife Jennie Lee, their friend Archibald Lush and medical staff at his bedside.
Born in the Welsh valleys to a mining family, Nye is profoundly influenced by the death of his father to coal-triggered lung cancer. He worked as a miner himself for eight years before working for the union. The play leaps backwards and forwards in time occasionally returning to the “reality” of the hospital. He is elected MP for Ebbw Vale in 1929 and there’s a fine scene with Winston Churchill in the House of Commons tea room because he’s every inch the awkward agitator and doesn’t allow the war to dent his principles. Also nicely done is the scene in which Clement Attlee, now prime minister after a Labour landslide victory in 1945, offers him the post of Minister of Health and Housing – to Nye’s incredulity.
We hear voices, like a Greek chorus, of many people who have suffered or died because of inequitable, often unaffordable, health provision. Taking his home town of Tredegar as his model Nye comes up with the idea of nationalising the hospitals, converting doctors and other medical staff into state employees and providing free health care for everyone. The play presents his struggles with cabinet colleagues and the fierce opposition he faced from doctors via the British Medical Association. Eventually, as we all know, he triumphed against considerable odds – and the play’s take on Nye can die in some sort of peace.
The stage directions require the house lights at the end so that the cast can see the audience and audience members can see each other to make the point that every single person present has benefited from Nye Bevan’s legacy. I cried at that point too and can vividly imagine what a powerful moment this must have been in the Olivier Theatre.
Nye is well worth reading and it certainly makes you stop and think about Bevan’s original vision and the extent to which it has (perforce?) been dented in the 80 years since 1945.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Is A River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane
