In 1923, George Bernard Shaw premiered his play Saint Joan, which retold the life of Joan of Arc. The title was intentionally ironic: rather than a saint, Shaw wanted to show a ‘heroic’ figure who was ‘merely’ human – destroyed not by some tragic flaw, nor any metaphysical fate, but by the unavoidable clash of her radical objectives and the entrenched social order. In Shaw’s play, the men who destroy Joan are not cackling villains, but ordinary men doing their ordinary best, for ordinary reasons.
In 2024, Tim Price’s Nye premiered at the National Theatre. The play, which completes its run this week, recounts the life of Aneurin Bevan and his role as founding father of the NHS. Like Saint Joan, it presents a ‘heroic life’, largely chronologically, and invites the audience to honour a fallen hero and reflect on their enduring contemporary legacy. Unlike Saint Joan, it consistently dodges opportunities to ask more complicated questions about its hero, their achievements, and the wider social and political contexts in which their story plays out.
Nye is one of a steady dribble of plays staged from the coalition era onwards that pick at the remains of mid-century British socialism. In 2012, James Graham’s This House presented the desperation of Labour whips between the 1975 General Election and the 1979 vote of no confidence in James Callaghan’s government. In 2017, Steve Waters’ Limehouse staged imagined conversations between Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, Bill Rodgers and David Owen prior to the founding of the SDP. In 2019, Andy Barrett’s Tony’s Last Tape dramatised the diaries of Tony Benn. These three plays implicitly rely on the underlying collective trauma of British leftists of a certain age: the rout of the 1970s Labour Party, and the dismantling of British social democracy at the hands of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. More or less explicitly, all investigate alternative histories in which the left has been less crushingly defeated, and invite us to think about what could have been, but for a few alterations to the historical record.
Nye reaches further back in time, to present its audience with an unambiguous win. It does not encourage you to worry about trade-offs, or contemplate paths not taken. In this respect, it is more akin to 2011’s The Iron Lady, which also presented its hero as flawed, but ultimately approved of her as an agent of historical progress. Nye is, at heart, a deeply conventional play; an unreconstructed great man narrative so old-fashioned I struggle to think of anything in the last decade to compare it to. We follow our great man’s life from birth to his great achievements. We are shown his unique qualities which enable him to do what others could not. Opening in a post-war hospital ward, we discover our eponymous hero (Michael Sheen) recuperating from surgery in a hospital, the narrative immediately reminds us, that he built. He is told it has gone well, but we as the audience know, via his wife Jennie Lee (Sharon Small), that he is dying. Bevan slips into a coma, sinking into recollections of the past which frame the play. Over the next two hours and forty minutes, we visit key episodes of Bevan’s life: his early joblessness, his success as a labour organiser in Tredegar, his election to parliament, his controversial role in the Second World War, and finally his efforts as Housing and Health Secretary, in Clement Attlee’s post-war government, to force through the creation of the NHS. As we fly through the decades, the ward’s patients, staff, and equipment are conscripted into telling the story. Nye’s most inventive moments emerge from this: bookshelves conjured from patients holding huge pillars of books, lecterns at a Tredegar council meeting upended, appearing as hospital beds where patients sleep at impossible angles and wake in chorus to put their awkward questions to the desiccated establishment goons Bevan is unseating.
Unlike Shaw’s Saint Joan, which consistently attacks and complicates our desire to find easy heroes and villains, undermines straightforward stories about progress, and asks sneaky questions about the role of individuals in historical processes, Nye feels like it is intended to convince us that Bevan was pretty great. But the entire audience already believes this. Price’s Nye belongs less to the category of recent political plays that ask counterfactual questions about the inevitability of socialism’s decades-long retreat; rather, it finds itself at home in the more amorphous tradition of politically fluid NHS porn.
The NHS gives contemporary British leftists a beautiful totem, for which they have few other candidates. It is an exemplary thing, universally acknowledged to be good, so much that even Conservatives must pay symbolic obeisance to it, and reassure the voting public it is ‘safe in their hands’. Crucially, it is an achievement which can be unambiguously attributed to the Labour party. It commands enormous emotional attachment, much as the wartime Churchill does for Conservatives.
Andrew Seaton, in Our NHS, has called this the ‘sacralisation’ of the NHS. As Seaton points out, the NHS has come to embody British social democracy, the post-war consensus, a romantic image of a cohesive and community-minded mid-century Britain (as in Heidi Thomas’ Call the Midwife). No other country has dedicated part of their Olympics opening ceremony to their state healthcare provider, as the UK did in 2012. Even the reliably cynical Alan Bennett can’t quite escape NHS sentimentalism. His 2018 play Allelujah! (also at the National Theatre) is scabrous regarding the innumerable bureaucratic stupidities and budget-cutting cruelties of healthcare in the UK today, but the NHS retains its totemic power. The play ends with a doctor holding a dying man’s hand. He breaks the fourth wall to turn to us and says the following:
“We may buckle, but we do not waver. We are tested, but we do not flinch. We are here when night falls, here when the darkness eases into dawn. We are here for your first cry, your last breath, when you are broken, when you bleed, when others recoil or reject you. We will be here for you when you are old. We would die for you. We are love itself. And for love, there is no charge.”
If you’re sitting in the audience and anything like me, you don’t notice because the writing is so beautiful, but this is bizarre. Other countries reserve this kind of language for their militaries or their clerics. Like all sacred objects, it doesn’t really matter what the reality behind the curtain is: the Turin Shroud may just be a bit of cloth, but if you think about it that way you’ll miss its vital causal power for those who believe. Similarly, the cultural totem of the NHS endures no matter how tatty the real institution becomes. Call the Midwife, Allelujah!, the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony and Nye all have in common an unreflective valorisation of the NHS. The doctors in Nye who oppose its formation are literally nameless and faceless, presented at distorted scale in lurid green light reminiscent of a horror film. You’re clearly not supposed to entertain the idea that any doctors could have opposed the NHS for principled reasons. They are grotesques.
There is an obvious retort to this, which is that a great man narrative is appropriate, because Bevan is a great man, and deserves the kind of dramatic treatment regularly handed out in film and theatre to various conservative figures, and that there is nothing wrong with valorising the NHS is this manner, because the NHS really is that marvellous. More, there is something graceless about the desire for a more “complicated,” morally grey picture in the context of a big happy show at the National Theatre where most of the audience seems delighted to be there for Michael Sheen delivering grand socialist rhetoric as only he can.
But even if you think Bevan and the NHS really are this amazing, this kind of heroic theatre requires an individualising and polemicising that does violence to the historical narrative, and I suspect Bevan himself would have hated.
Nye’s narrative form is not so much peppered with these liberties – it demands them, at scale. In the second half, a sinister Clement Atlee (permanently seated in an unaccountably hilarious moving desk) invites Bevan to become Minister of Health and Housing. This is presented as a Machiavellian move on Attlee’s part: he will co-opt the left of the Labour Party and hand Bevan a brief in which he will probably fail (although the script also gives Attlee one line to suggest, in standard great man mode, his belief that Bevan is the only man that could possibly succeed at this task). More problematically, the NHS is then presented as something Bevan thinks up by himself, to the horror of the postwar cabinet, after becoming a minister. This is not just slightly wrong. This isn’t ungenerous nit-picking. This is wildly, vitally wrong in a way which does huge disservice to the rest of the Labour party: the NHS was an explicit commitment in the 1945 election manifesto. Presenting it as the unexpected brainchild of Bevan after he was cajoled into becoming minister is an irresponsible fiction necessitated by the individualising requirements of a great man narrative.
Secondly, a great man narrative demands an antagonist. In Nye’s second half, that role is allocated to Herbert Morrison (Jon Furlong.) Morrison is presented as an unimaginative establishment insider and unreconstructed snob, who tries to block all of Bevan’s ideas out of vanity, a desire for power and control, and an elitist incomprehension that good ideas could come from someone of Bevan’s background. This is a slander on Morrison, and there is no historical warrant for this hatchet job. Morrison’s suggestion that local councils be empowered in the governance of the NHS is presented as a wrecking amendment designed to kill the NHS. But before becoming Leader of the Commons in 1945, Morrison led the socialist London County Council through the 1930s, and delivered, among other things, locally-provided healthcare under local control. He consistently argued for democratic control by workers at the local level as an important component of real social democracy. There is every reason to believe that his advocacy for a more decentralised health service was not a wrecking amendment, but a sincerely held, principled consequence of his socialist beliefs.
Finally, spare a thought for poor Jennie Lee. Sharon Small does her best with some ropey dialogue (why, for example, does a woman born in 1904 say things like ‘What is your problem?’) but can’t escape her reduction to a recognisable archetype: a frosty vixen who Bevan successfully thaws. Worse still, you could attentively watch this play and leave with no idea that Jennie Lee had any life beyond being Bevan’s wife. In an implicit recognition of how unjust this is, the NT’s programme includes an excerpt from Cathy Newman’s Bloody Brilliant Women pointing out that Lee was one of the most important women in the mid-century Labour Party, and had a varied and significant life after Bevan’s death – including, most famously, becoming Minister for the Arts in Harold Wilson’s government of 1964-70, a role in which she founded the Open University. I understand that she is not the central focus, but in a play that is explicitly about legacy, it should be possible to give Lee her due. I suspect it is not prioritised because her role here is solely to propel the great man onwards.
Nye repeatedly beats historical complexity into the shape required by its own heroic frame. This is a terrible missed opportunity: the large audience guaranteed by Sheen’s star power could have coped with, even enjoyed a few of the tough questions posed by the founding of the NHS, or British socialism in the first half of the 20th century more generally. On the night though, it was obvious that the audience did not care. There was an immediate standing ovation, which felt like a collective pat on the back for the audience rather than the cast. The audience got their just-so story about Bevan being such a wonderful chap, and the NHS being so brilliant, and they themselves implicitly marvellous for thinking so. People left This House or Limehouse worried about the choices everyone made, and reflecting on ways things could have played out differently. In contrast, at the end of Nye, I felt an overwhelming sense of contented satisfaction from the people around me. Like clapping care workers during COVID, it is a performative and empty gesture. In a context where the real NHS is on its knees after decades of continuous assault, that self-congratulatory act of worship is a betrayal of the compromises and political commitments required to create it.
Will Jones is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. He goes to too many plays.