What better time to consider the idea that British society can be reimagined and to look at the beginnings of the welfare state. Last week, Lucy Kirkwood’s The Human Body provided a whirligig version of post-second world war life seen through the eyes of a female doctor. Now Tim Price’s new play, co-produced with the Wales Millennium Centre, looks at the inspiring achievements of Aneurin “Nye” Bevan, the Welsh Labour firebrand who founded the NHS. It is a wasted opportunity.
Nye is a fevered dream. Beginning in 1960, with the 62-year-old Bevan in a hospital bed, the drama whisks back episodically: to schooldays and memories of the miner father who died of pneumoconiosis (“black lung” disease), through union and local council activity, to the magnificent transforming work as minister of health that made him a beacon of the left.
