GWhen rowing in Gwynedd it was quite common to come across children called Aneurin. The name, which possibly means ‘man of honour’ or ‘all of gold’, is a misspelling of Aneirin, or Neirin, the early medieval Brythonic poet who wrote Y Gododdin. The most famous Aneurin, however, is Aneurin Bevan, known simply as Nye, best known for devising and leading 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 have been amazed at how few younger people outside Wales – including those working in the NHS – are familiar with the Labor politician and the monumental role he has played in our history.
No, a new play at the National Theatre, will hopefully change that. Michael Sheen embodies 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, stuttering miner’s son from Tredegar in Monmouthshire discovered books, then a political consciousness and, after his father’s harrowing death from black lung, a passionate desire to improve working families’ access to medical treatment. transform.
Even if it occasionally veers towards the sentimental (something that seems to have irritated the more harsh critics, but not this Welsh leftist of course), it gets away with it because it is also inventive, surreal and sometimes very funny. (Personally, I think an audience can tolerate a bit of swelling music if it’s accompanied by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, played by a woman in a bald wig who controls a desk that moves like a Dalek.)
Like Bevan, Sheen is something of a Welsh folk hero, and his embodiment of the role is astonishing, especially the way he is able to evoke the childlike mannerisms of a young Nye. What comes across so starkly, even to those of us who know the history, is the sheer level of resistance and opposition he faced in his quest to ‘redegarise’ Britain by recreating his local medical aid organization on a national scale.
This opposition came not just from the Tories, but also from the press, the Labor Party and the British Medical Association (a joke about having to break the doctors’ union got one of the biggest laughs of the evening). His attack on the BMA was ‘without mercy’, as this newspaper reported 76 years ago. A risky strategy, but he won.
This is no hagiography, however: the writer, Tim Price, does not shy away from the aggressive, recalcitrant aspects of Bevan’s character. Nor does he ignore gender politics: it was nice to hear how Bevan’s wife, the Labor MP Jennie Lee, sidelined her own ambitions to support her husband’s career. Nye’s conversations with his furious sister, Arianwen, about the burden of caring for his father are striking in the way they evoke the ways in which a great man’s commitment to politics might lead him to look beyond the immediate needs of his family, and the sacrifices he made. by women saddled with domestic labor to facilitate broader social justice.
I would have liked to see and hear from his mother, who only exists offstage as a woman exhausted by caregiving. (Missing mothers are a bugbear of mine.) I would also have liked to see his other sister, Bronwen, burn his draft papers during the First World War; it doesn’t sound like any of the women in his family took any prisoners.
I also wondered about the infant mortality rate. At the end of the piece we are left with the thought that the creation of the NHS reduced child mortality by 50%. Of Bevan’s ten siblings, four died in infancy and one at the age of eight. This must have made a deep impression on him.
But when you turn someone’s life story into two hours and forty minutes of theater, you have to leave things out. As the NHS crumbles after years of Conservative neglect, the topicality of the play and some lines about Tory interests and ideology were not lost on the audience. Many of them could also apply now. In one moving scene we see a teeming crowd of members of the public coming one by one to Bevan to tell desperate stories of the medical care urgently needed for themselves and their loved ones.
While things aren’t as abject as they were in the post-war era, it’s sobering that you can stage a similar scene today. I’m not surprised that one member of the company, actor and junior doctor Sara Otung, was moved to tears when she first read the script.
We all have a stake in the survival of the NHS, and that stake is deeply personal for many of us. Perhaps this play, which is apparently in unprecedented demand and will be shown in cinemas nationwide, will help combine 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 has built, this could not be more urgent or necessary.