‘Behind every great man stands a great woman,” the dated old saying goes. In the case of the celebrated Labour politician Aneurin Bevan, honoured in a new play at the National Theatre in London, the woman is his largely forgotten wife, Jennie Lee, who earned her own independent “greatness” on the public stage, not a domestic one.
Now Lee, who was Britain’s first arts minister and established the Open University and the Arts Council, as well as backing the building of the National Theatre itself, is to have her own spotlight, with two new plays celebrating her life.
Lee already has a cameo role in Tim Price’s play Nye, starring Michael Sheen, but a string of reviews have seen this as a lost opportunity. “She remains flat, which seems a crime – her character could have been far richer,” wrote the Guardian’s Arifa Akbar.
Lee’s portrayal by the actor Sharon Small is winning plaudits, but it gives no sense of the scale of her achievements, her admirers complain. Admittedly, Lee did not lay the foundations of the National Health Service, like her husband, but she became an MP aged just 24 and had a big influence on British postwar culture.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, the Observer’s theatre critic Susannah Clapp said the chance to mark Lee’s significance had been missed, adding that she deserved her own play.
But in a timely bit of balance-redressing, the award-winning playwright Lindsay Rodden has written Jennie Lee, which is to tour Britain from this spring, one of two new shows from the acclaimed Mikron Theatre Company. And Lee is also the subject of a play by Matthew Knights, Jennie Lee: Tomorrow Is a New Day, coming to Scottish theatres later this year.
Knights, who takes his title from Lee’s own book of that name, has said he admires Lee’s call for high standards, often quoted when she set up the Open University: “There it is, a great independent university which does not insult any man or woman whatever their background by offering them the second best. Nothing but the best is good enough.”
Rodden, whose work will open at Marsden, West Yorkshire on 5 April, said this weekend that she had “decided to find out about the remarkable life of Jennie Lee” because she knew of her commitment to bettering the lives of the working class, although she was commonly remembered only as Bevan’s wife.
“What I didn’t know then was that this daughter of a coal miner, who became an MP at an age when, as a woman, she couldn’t even vote herself, lived a long and fascinating life, bore witness to all the horror and pride of the 20th century, and made history,” said Rodden. “Her life was full of drama and theatre, and I knew I had to put it on the stage. In fact I could have written three plays from her 84 years of struggle and triumph.”
The Mikron production of her play will include the fiery encounter she had with Winston Churchill on her first appearance in the House of Commons, and the publicity for the play notes wryly in passing: “Oh yes, and founder of the NHS Nye Bevan was her husband. But Jennie is no footnote in someone else’s past.”
According to Mikron’s producer, Marianne McNamara, the company’s small travelling productions are well suited to Lee’s belief that “in any civilised community the arts and associated amenities, serious or comic, light or demanding, must occupy a central place. Their enjoyment should not be regarded as remote from everyday life.”
Lee died in November 1988.
Mikron will visit 137 venues this year, sometimes arriving by narrowboat, and more than half of the performances will be staged on a “pay what you feel” basis.
“Lee was clever, erudite, stylish and funny – stubborn and sharp too,” said Rodden. “I wish I had known her. Putting her on the stage is the next best thing.”
• This article was amended on 10 March 2024. The title of the new play by Lindsay Rodden is Jennie Lee, not Radical and Rebel as an earlier version said.
