At the LSE, I have the great pleasure of teaching students from all over the world. Many of them are completely baffled by the British relationship with the National Health Service. That is not to say they think it provides bad healthcare. Many of them are really impressed by it. But they find the deep emotional attachment to a public service strange. In the past, we have collectively tried to think of parallel examples of veneration for institutions in other countries and have struggled. The closest we have come is military service and veterans in the US.
Nye, currently playing at the NT for a second run after premiering last year, might simultaneously baffle the students more but also offer some explanation for popular feelings towards the NHS. Nigel Lawson famously said that the NHS was as close a thing as the British have to a national religion. That being so, Nye is essentially the NHS’s version of the nativity story.
Like any self respecting faith, the NHS is there for major life events, able to ritualise both birth and death. Nye is the account of one particular death – Aneurin Bevan, the left-wing Labour MP who was Minister for Health in the 1945 Attlee government which founded the NHS. Told through flashbacks, it documents the world before the NHS and the struggle to create it. The play is not a hyper-realistic Aaron Sorkin-style political talkfest, but a fantasia which owes something to Dennis Potter, as well as featuring the Director Rufus Norris’s trademark staging. Michael Sheen as Bevan gives a powerhouse of a performance, never leaving the stage for the whole duration of the production.
The whole premise is that Bevan is dying in a hospital and a system which he built. Something so grand that it changed everything and, while not perfect, the NHS put an end to the sort of inequality and suffering he witnessed in the interwar years. The play reminds us of an age of big politicians and even bigger political ideas.
When Nye did its first run at the NT in Spring last year, the Conservatives were in power and Labour were heading for government. The play would have seemed overtly pro-Labour, essentially an exercise in marking time until a new government was formed, the descendent of older Labour administrations. Now though Labour is back in power, and Bevan’s soliloquies about fairness and dignity might land rather differently (especially given recent events). The play does not cover the later period of Bevan’s political career, as the narrative essentially stops in July 1948 with the foundation of the NHS, but the current Labour leadership might not want to be reminded of Bevan’s resignation from the cabinet over the imposition of prescription charges in April 1951.
I should also mention another great British institution at this point, as the National Theatre ticket for the third row in the stalls for Nye was only £20, which is a brilliant bargain for seeing one of the greatest contemporary British actors at the top of his game.