Growing up in Gwynedd, it was fairly common to encounter children called Aneurin. The name, meaning possibly “man of honour” or “all golden”, is a misspelling of Aneirin, or Neirin, the early medieval Brythonic poet who wrote Y Gododdin. The most famous Aneurin, however, is Aneurin Bevan, called Nye for short, best known for conceiving and spearheading the NHS.
In 1948, almost everyone in Britain knew his name. His death, in 1960, led to an outpouring of national mourning. In 2004, he topped a list of 100 Welsh heroes. But in recent years, I’ve been surprised how few younger people outside Wales – those working in the NHS included – are familiar with the Labour politician and the monumental role he played in our history.
Nye, a new play at the National Theatre (co-produced with Wales Millennium Centre), will hopefully change that. It sees Michael Sheen embody the politician as he nears the end of his life in one of the hospitals he built, slipping in and out of consciousness as he revisits key moments in his personal and political life. It tells the story of how a shy, stammering miner’s son from Tredegar in Monmouthshire discovered books, then a political consciousness, and, after the harrowing death of his father from black lung, a passionate desire to transform working families’ access to medical treatment.
Though it verges towards the sentimental at times (something that seems to have annoyed the more hard-hearted critics, but not, naturally, this Welsh lefty), it gets away with it because it’s also inventive, surreal and at times very funny. (I personally think an audience can take a bit of swelling music when it’s complemented by Prime Minister Clement Attlee being played by a woman in a bald wig piloting a desk that moves like a Dalek.)
Like Bevan, Sheen is something of a Welsh folk hero, and his embodiment of the role astonishing, especially the way he is able to invoke the childish mannerisms of a young Nye. What comes across so strongly, even to those of us who know the history, is the sheer level of resistance and opposition he faced in his quest to “Tredegarise” the UK by recreating his local medical aid society on a national scale.
This opposition came not just from the Tories, but from the press, the Labour party and the British Medical Association (a quip about having to break the doctors’ union got one of the biggest laughs of the night). His attack on the BMA was “without mercy”, as this paper reported 76 years ago. A risky strategy, but he won.
This isn’t hagiography, though: the writer, Tim Price, doesn’t shy away from the aggressive, recalcitrant aspects of Bevan’s character. Nor does he ignore gender politics: it was pleasing to learn how Bevan’s wife, the Labour MP Jennie Lee, sidelined her own ambitions to support her husband’s career. Nye’s exchanges with his furious sister, Arianwen, about the burden of his father’s care, are striking in how they evoke the ways in which a great man’s commitment to politics might cause him to look beyond the immediate needs of his family, and the sacrifices made by women saddled with domestic labour to facilitate wider social justice.
I would have liked to have seen and heard from his mother, who exists only offstage as a woman exhausted by the labour of caring. (Missing mothers are a bugbear of mine.) I would have also liked to have seen his other sister, Bronwen, burning his conscription papers during the first world war; it does not sound as though any of the women in his family took prisoners.
I wondered, too, about infant mortality. At the end of the play, we are left with the thought that the foundation of the NHS decreased infant mortality by 50%. Of Bevan’s 10 siblings, four died in infancy and one at the age of eight. This will have profoundly affected him.
However, adapting anyone’s life story into two hours and 40 minutes of theatre means having to leave things out. As the NHS crumbles after years of Conservative neglect, the timeliness of the play, and some of its lines about Tory interests and ideology, were not lost on the audience. Many of them could equally apply now. In one affecting scene, we see a teeming crowd of members of the public coming towards Bevan one by one to recount desperate tales of the medical care that is urgently required for themselves and their loved ones.
Though things are not as abject as they were in the postwar era, it is sobering that you could stage a similar scene today. I am not surprised that one member of the company, the actor and junior doctor Sara Otung, was reduced to tears when she first read the script.
We all have a stake in the survival of the NHS, and that stake is, for many of us, deeply personal. Perhaps this play, which is apparently seeing unprecedented demand and which will be screened in cinemas nationwide, will help blend that sense of personal investment with the political, by introducing the story of this great politician and Welshman to a new generation. I hope as many schoolchildren as possible get to see it. As the Tories continue to destroy what Bevan built, it could not be more urgent or more necessary.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author
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