Michael Sheen is “in his element” as the architect of the NHS, Aneurin Bevan, in Tim Price’s play “Nye”.
He is “by turns down to earth and messianic, tender and full of clenched tenacity”, said Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph. And there is “no faulting the rest of the company either”.
Younger audience members “may know next to nothing about” Bevan, known as Nye, “the honourable member for Ebbw Vale, the left-wing orator who oversaw the creation of the National Health Service”, said Clive Davis in The Times.
This production will “hopefully change that”, said Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett in The Guardian. In 1948, when the NHS was founded, “almost everyone in Britain knew his name”, and his death in 1960 “led to an outpouring of national mourning”.
Like the former Labour MP and health minister, Sheen is “something of a Welsh folk hero, and his embodiment of the role astonishing”, said Cosslett. Yes, the play “verges towards the sentimental at times”, but it gets away with its slightly saccharine note “because it’s also inventive, surreal and at times very funny”.
There’s some “skating over historical detail” as we follow him “from cradle to grave in a morphine-induced fever-dream amid Bevan’s hospitalisation with terminal stomach cancer in 1960”, said Cavendish. At one point, he sings a rendition of “Get Happy” in his pyjamas, with medical staff dancing around him.
Having an “ageing famous figure reliving his life in convenient vignettes” like this is a little “tired” as a format, said Alice Saville in The Independent, but director Rufus Norris “keeps things nimble and strange”.
There are “poignant biographical insights”. Initially, Sheen is “touchingly delighted to be treated by the public health system he helped dream into existence”, but is soon “lost in post-operative hallucinations: the sadistic schoolteacher who beat him for his stammer, the black lung-afflicted miner father who – ironically – he couldn’t or wouldn’t help”.
We also learn how Bevan’s wife, Labour MP Jennie Lee, “sidelined her own ambitions to support her husband’s career”, said Cosslett in The Guardian. With the NHS currently crumbling, “the timeliness of the play, and some of its lines about Tory interests and ideology, were not lost on the audience”.
National Theatre, London SE1 (020-3989 5455) until 11 May. Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 18 May to 1 June. Screened live in cinemas via NT Live on 23 April.