cLeaning up the dog feces stuffed through the letterbox was not a task Aneurin Bevan’s secretary had initially signed up for. But as the Welsh socialist moved more and more into the public eye, it was an unpleasant inconvenience that had to be addressed regularly.
As the son of a miner, Minister of Health under Clement Attlee and architect of the NHS, ‘Nye’ Bevan was a man of principles; he was expelled from the Labor Party for refusing to adhere to party lines he disagreed with. “If you asked a little child what a politician should be,” says playwright Tim Price, “it would be this way.” He went into politics because he wanted to make a difference and he didn’t compromise until he made it.â€
Before the welfare state, adequate healthcare in Britain was a postcode lottery. Illness or injury can mean the end of a working life. Women, who were often unable to obtain health insurance, were expected to simply deteriorate from the pain because they were unable to access the treatment they needed. But in Tredegar, the Welsh mining town where Bevan grew up, he had seen the local Medical Aid Society provide health care for entire families. Bevan later became president of the association and “witnessed firsthand the impact of socialized medicine on a community,” Price explains. ‘He famously said he wanted to ‘Tredegarise’ the country, and by creating the National Health Service he did just that.
Price’s previous piece, Teh Internet Is Serious Business, tackled the subject energetically and imaginatively, making the lawless online world physical. His new play is one of two focusing on the drama of the NHS this spring. One is concerned with its formation, the other with its current crumbling.
Price’s play Nye, which opens at the National Theater on February 24, a day of strike action for trainee doctors, before heading to the Wales Millennium Center in Cardiff, spans the breadth of Bevan’s extraordinary life. This is the man who oversaw the building of more than 800,000 social homes during the creation of the NHS. Bevan did not allow obstacles to limit his ambitions. “We talk about how there’s not enough money for the NHS now,” says Price drily, “but when they launched the NHS we were still rationing bread.”
Price has always enjoyed writing the unstoppable. “I asked Rufus (Norris, the play’s director) to stage Nye in a confrontation with 70,000 doctors,” he grins. Bevan is played by Michael Sheen, who is “steeped in Bevan lore,” says Price, with the actor having made documentaries about the political figure. “In some ways he was born to play the role.” With the show set to perform to 1,150 people a night at National’s Olivier theatre, Price is proud of how Nye focuses a Welsh story on such a huge big theater. phase. “We don’t have the resources in Wales to fund and put on shows of this scale,” he says candidly. “We always tell other people’s stories. The opportunity to perform with our own accents is a great privilege.”
“From cradle to grave” was Nye’s dream when he founded the NHS; he believed that healthcare should be there to support us all, free at the point of use, throughout our lives. Today the NHS is our treatments, our operations and our most extreme emotions of fear, pain, relief and sadness. But far from being all high-intensity drama, much of the time the average person spends on the NHS will consist of poor hospital sandwiches and slightly run-down waiting rooms. As playwright Sophia Chetin-Leuner says, “For somewhere where the stakes are so high, it can be very funny and very boring.”
Chetin-Leuner’s dark comedy, This Might Not Be It, brings the story of the NHS into the present. The play never leaves the small office of an adolescent psychiatric clinic and highlights the daily reality of life amid massive budget cuts, unpaid overtime and endless piles of paperwork. “It’s kind of a love letter to the Tavistock,” says Chetin-Leuner, who was inspired by the two years she received free therapy at the north London clinic. “My father also has a lot of chronic health problems, so I spent a lot of time absorbing and observing in waiting rooms.”
Inspired by interviews Chetin-Leuner conducted with psychiatric nurses and receptionists, she focuses on a receptionist named Angela, who worked in the play’s fictional clinic for 25 years. “The Angelas I’ve met have great comedic timing,” she says. “It’s kind of an achievement to be at the front desk.â€
Angela’s system is shaken up when a young temporary worker joins in, eager to change the world. “I wanted to follow his journey from optimism to nihilism to something more quietly hopeful about how we can care on a smaller level,” says Chetin-Leuner. The show will play from the end of January at the Bush Theatre, the west London fringe space that champions new writing, and has the recent success of bringing Tyrell Williams’ Red Pitch to the West End this spring.
Price and Chetin-Leuner follow a long line of playwrights drawn to the drama of Britain’s medical and healthcare system. “You often only engage with the NHS in times of crisis,” says Price of the appeal to medical drama. ‘But the NHS is also involved because it is an ideological gesture. It’s the idea of fairness. It is one of our last pieces of society, driven by community and people. It’s a lot of drama and big ideas.â€
In 1969, Peter Nichols’ popular black comedy The National Health satirized the impact of underfunding on a men’s hospital ward. Based on the time the playwright spent on the treatment, the play was adapted for TV and briefly shown on Broadway, although American audiences were far less impressed, perhaps out of jealousy of British liberalism. user-friendly system. More recently, Allelujah! by Alan Bennett! delves into a geriatric ward under threat from a greedy government, while Lucy Kirkwood’s new play The Human Body sees a GP and Labor Party councilor desperately try to implement Bevan’s National Health Service Act amid a climate of austerity. Roy Williams wrote in Come Back Tomorrow about the racism experienced by two generations of exhausted women in a Swansea hospital, the first a member of the Windrush generation and the second, her granddaughter, in the present day. Bernardine Evaristo’s First, Do No Harm, joins Adrian Lester and Lolita Chakrabarti’s healthcare-themed monologue series, The Greatest Wealth. There was even NHS the Musical.
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Unsurprisingly, given the increased focus on healthcare and wellbeing, the pandemic spawned a flood of shows about the NHS, with Talawa Theater Company creating Tales from the Front Line, a powerful collection of short films about black key workers. Back in theaters in person after the pandemic ended, Nathan Ellis’ Super High Resolution crackled with the pressure on doctors in training. Playwrights seemed to increasingly grapple with what it means to care and be cared for, and where the costs of that care really lie.
Part of the appeal of stories embedded in the NHS is their sense of tangibility, says Chetin-Leuner. “When I interviewed people for production and casting, almost everyone had an aunt or sister who worked for the NHS. It affects everyone so directly.†She wanted to investigate the individual people who keep the critical service running. “We say it is free care, but care is never free,” she reasons. “The play is about the emotional toll that caring takes on a person, and how individuals must fill the gaps when a large healthcare system cannot function.” This burden, both playwrights note, is too often borne by women, and disproportionately by women of color. Research shows that of all NHS staff, the same group is most likely to experience discrimination from patients or colleagues.
The NHS is currently underfunded by billions, with rising costs after a decade of underinvestment and staff wages stagnating over the past decade. “Somewhere like the Tavistock is such a great resource that has helped so many people,” says Chetin-Leuner. “It’s just about such bad cuts that they can’t help anymore, which means it’s letting people down over and over again.” Price points out that the ‘tax gap’ that HMRC goes uncollected each year is roughly £32 billion, far more than enough to not only plug the cracks but radically improve our healthcare. “We couldn’t just have a well-functioning NHS with waiting lists being cut,” he says. “We couldn’t have waiting lists. There could be overcapacity. We can have an ambulance there in a few minutes because they are on standby.â€
Both express their admiration for the staff who continue to do the best within the current challenging system. “I think he would be incredibly proud of the enormous loyalty, love and care of the staff who work across the country every day,” Price said of Bevan. “And I think he would be appalled at how undermined the country has been by consistent governments.”
Fueled by the politician’s unwavering principles, Price sees a party’s position on NHS funding as the most critical policy issue worth voting on. ‘Politics is the language of priorities,†he insists, ‘so it’s just a question of what is your priority? Is it research and development in the weapons sector, or is it healthcare and housing?
Nye is at the National Theatre: OlivierLondon, February 24 until May 11 (NT Live broadcast April 23), And Wales Millennium CentreCardiff, May 18 until June 1; This couldn’t be it is on the buh theaterLondon, until March 2.