Nye at the National Theatre
A man in pyjamas sits atop a lonely bed at stage centre, cradling the heaving, wheezing figure of his father, a coal miner dying from a fatal lung condition. His son is himself a patient, but temporarily absent from his own bed to traverse a wide plain of memory and dream to, quite literally, embrace his past. “I’m going to look after everyone for you!”, the boy man declares, entirely childlike and unmistakably not. “I’m going to look after everyone”.
In its collision of formal daring, striking imagery, and tidy – perhaps too tidy – psychological assessment, the act-closing moment feels perfectly encapsulating of Tim Price and director Rufus Norris’s Nye as a whole. At various moments, this reimagining of the life and death of Labour MP and NHS spearhead Aneurin “Nye” Bevan – returning to the National Theatre along with star Michael Sheen after a sold-out 2024 run – shakes off the constraints of bio drama politesse to make thrilling frog leaps into the nightmarishly absurd. Framed as the dying dreams of Bevan from the hospital bed where he’d pass in 1960, the PJ-clad Sheen is ferried from childhood to middle age, from soaring career highs to crippling lows.
At one point, Nye’s cane-happy childhood tormentor, Mr Orchard (Matthew Bulgo), is depicted stalking the classroom on two menacingly oversized canes, like a demonic spider advancing on its prey. Elsewhere, an early conference of the South Wales Miners’ Federation, where Bevan would discover his gift for rhetoric, is staged, with morbid amusement, around overturned hospital beds in place of podiums. The still-sleeping patients are bound up tightly in their sheets, facing out to the crowd, until they too interject with queries and rhetorical fire of their own. A full Busby Berkeley musical number is not at all out of place, with Sheen merrily crooning Get Happy while bedbound patients kick their feet in the air.
It’s a bold injection of whimsy in what ought to be a wearyingly polite rendering of recent history, and Nye is nothing if not a showcase for Vicki Mortimer’s fluid sets, compellingly interpolating ghostly hospital settings with Nye’s incomplete, fragmentary scraps of memory. Still, as dazzling as these flourishes can be, they can also leave the play stranded dramatically, with only the broadest of brushstrokes at hand to render a lucid glimpse at our fervently idealistic hero’s psychology. As with so many bio dramas before it, Nye would suppose that the foundational, defining trauma of the man’s life was the slow death of his father, and his own fear-stricken rejection of care for the dying man; shame over a fearful retreat translated into the altruistic drive to never again see this neglect replicated.
It certainly paves the way for a clear arc, as well as for visitations from the dead man’s ghost, beckoning Nye towards the bright-yet-dingy light. Still, come the end of the lengthy two hours and 40 minutes, it feels like we still know little more of Nye than this one definitive conclusion, and though Sheen is as assured as ever, the performance’s persistent single note of gee-whiz earnestness proves similarly unrevealing. It‘s when Nye briefly puts the pyrotechnics on hold that its subject resonates the most, not least in a wryly funny, often outright catty face-off between Sheen and Tony Jayawardena as a blustery Winston Churchill, or Nye’s wife Jennie Lee (Sharon Small) reflecting at his bedside on the “slow burn” of their marriage. In these moments when Nye pauses for breath, a more complex, pensive study of its subject takes shape, one that struggles to register amidst the rotating chronology and broad dramatics of the play’s core, dreamlike conceit.
Ultimately, Nye is refreshingly ambitious in its dedication to wild flights of fancy over the drier, expected markers of biographical drama, filtering the history of the NHS through the shifting dreamscapes of All That Jazz. Nonetheless, this approach can leave it stranded in broad melodrama that takes a simple assessment of its subject’s psychology. When a medical emergency brought the press night performance to a brief halt, leading to a wash of effusive applause upon its return, this moment seemed to bring home the play’s urgent advocacy for caring for medical care in more vivid terms than the play itself.
Thomas Messner
Photos: Johan Persson
Nye is at the National Theatre from 11th July until 16th August 2025. For further information or to book, visit the theatre’s website here.
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