Cleaning up the dog excrement squished through the letterbox was not a task Aneurin Bevan’s secretary had initially signed up to. But as the Welsh socialist increasingly found himself in the public eye, it was an odorous inconvenience that frequently had to be dealt with.
As the son of a miner, minister of health under Clement Attlee and architect of the NHS, “Nye” Bevan was a man of principle; he was booted out of the Labour party for refusing to abide by party lines he didn’t agree with. “If you were going to ask a small child what a politician should be,” considers playwright Tim Price, “Nye was it. He got into politics because he wanted to make a difference and he didn’t compromise until he’d made it.”
Prior to the welfare state, adequate healthcare in Britain was a postcode lottery. Illness or injury could mean the end of a working life. Women, who were often unable to get medical insurance, were expected to simply deteriorate in pain as they were prevented from having access to the treatment they required. Yet in Tredegar, the Welsh mining town where Bevan grew up, he had seen how the local Medical Aid Society covered entire families for healthcare. Bevan later became chair of the society, and “witnessed first-hand the impact of socialised medicine on a community,” Price explains. “He famously said he wanted to ‘Tredegar-ise’ the country,” and by forming the National Health Service, he did just that.
Price’s previous play, Teh Internet Is Serious Business, took on its subject with energy and invention and making physical the lawless online world. His new play is one of two platforming the drama of the NHS this spring. One deals with its formation, the other its current crumbling.
Price’s play, Nye, which opens at the National Theatre on 24 February, a day of strike action for junior doctors, before going to the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff, takes on the breadth of Bevan’s extraordinary life. This is the man who, while creating the NHS, oversaw the building of more than 800,000 council houses. Bevan didn’t allow obstacles to limit his ambitions. “We talk about there not being enough money for the NHS now,” Price says drily, “but when they launched the NHS, we were still rationing bread.”
Price has always enjoyed writing the unstageable. “I’ve asked Rufus [Norris, the play’s director] to stage Nye having a confrontation with 70,000 doctors,” he grins. Bevan is to be played by Michael Sheen, who is “steeped in Bevan lore”, Price says, with the actor having made documentaries about the political figure. “In some ways, he was born to play the part.” With the show due to perform to 1,150 people a night at the National’s Olivier theatre, Price is proud of how Nye centres a Welsh story on such a huge stage. “We don’t have the resources in Wales to fund and put on shows of this scale,” he says frankly. “We’re always telling other people’s stories. The chance to perform in our own accents is a great privilege.”
“From the cradle to the grave” was Nye’s dream when he formed the NHS; he believed that healthcare should be there to support us all, free at the point of use, throughout our entire lives. Today, the NHS is our treatments, our surgeries and our most extreme emotions of fear, pain, relief and grief. But far from all being high-intensity drama, much of the average person’s time spent engaging with the NHS will be bad hospital sandwiches and slightly dilapidated waiting rooms. As the playwright Sophia Chetin-Leuner says: “For somewhere that has such high stakes, 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 day. Never leaving the tiny office of an adolescent mental health clinic, the play highlights the daily realities of life amid enormous cuts, unpaid overtime and endless piles of paperwork. “It is sort of a love letter to the Tavistock,” says Chetin-Leuner, who was inspired by the two years she spent accessing free therapy at the north London clinic. “My dad has a lot of chronic health issues too, so I’ve 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 called Angela, who has worked at the play’s fictional clinic for 25 years. “The Angelas I’ve met have great comic timing,” she says. “There’s a sort of performance to being on the front desk.”
Angela’s system gets shaken up when a young temp joins, eager to change the world. “I wanted to track his journey from optimism to nihilism to something more quietly hopeful about how we can care on a smaller level,” Chetin-Leuner says. The show plays from the end of January at the Bush theatre, the west London fringe space that champions new writing, and has the recent success of transferring Tyrell Williams’s Red Pitch to the West End this Spring.
Price and Chetin-Leuner follow a long line of dramatists drawn to the drama of the medical and healthcare system in the UK. “You often only engage with the NHS in a moment of crisis,” says Price of the attraction to medical drama. “But the NHS is also engaging because it’s an ideological gesture. It’s the idea of fairness. It’s one of our last pieces of society driven by community and people. It’s high drama and grand ideas.”
Back in 1969, Peter Nichols’ popular black comedy, The National Health, satirised the impact of underfunding on a men’s hospital ward. Based on the playwright’s time spent receiving treatment, the play was adapted for TV and taken briefly to Broadway, although its American audiences were far less impressed, perhaps out of jealousy of Britain’s free-at-the-point-of-use system. More recently, Alan Bennett’s Allelujah! dived into a geriatric ward threatened by a greedy government, while Lucy Kirkwood’s new play The Human Body sees a GP and Labour party councillor desperately trying to implement Bevan’s National Health Service Act amid a climate of austerity. Roy Williams wrote about the racism experienced by two generations of exhausted women in a Swansea hospital in Come Back Tomorrow, the first a member of the Windrush generation and the second, her granddaughter, in the present day. Bernardine Evaristo’s First, Do No Harm added to Adrian Lester and Lolita Chakrabarti’s series of health service-themed monologues, The Greatest Wealth. There was even NHS the Musical.
Unsurprisingly, given the intensified focus on healthcare and wellbeing, the pandemic gave flight to a flurry of shows about the NHS, with Talawa Theatre Company creating Tales from the Front Line, a powerful collection of shorts about Black key workers. Back in theatres, in-person after the pandemic ended, Nathan Ellis’s Super High Resolution crackled with the pressures on junior doctors. Increasingly, playwrights seemed to be grappling with what it means to care and be cared for, and where the cost of that care truly lies.
Part of the attraction of stories embedded in the NHS is their sense of tangibility, says Chetin-Leuner. “When I was interviewing people for the production crew and casting, almost everyone had an aunt or sister who worked for the NHS. Everyone is so directly affected by it.” She wanted to explore the individual people who keep the critical service going. “We say it’s free care but care is never free,” she reasons. “The play is about the emotional toll that caring takes on someone, and how individuals have to fill in the gaps when a big system of care can’t function.” This burden, both playwrights note, is too often held by women, and disproportionately by women of colour. Research shows the same group are most likely of all NHS staff to experience discrimination from patients or colleagues.
The NHS is currently underfunded by billions, with rising costs following a decade of underinvestment and staff wages having remained stagnant for the past decade. “Somewhere like the Tavistock is such an amazing resource that’s helped so many people,” says Chetin-Leuner. “It’s just experiencing such bad cuts that they can’t help more, which means it does fail people, time and time again.” Price points out the “tax gap” uncollected by HMRC every year is roughly £32bn, far more than enough to not just paper over the cracks but radically improve our healthcare. “We could have not only a functioning NHS with waiting lists cut,” he says. “We could have no waiting lists. We could have excess capacity. We could have an ambulance there in a couple of minutes because they’re on standby.”
Both express admiration for the staff who keep doing the best they can within today’s challenging system. “I think he’d be incredibly proud of the immense loyalty and love and care from the staff that goes on everyday up and down the country,” Price says of Bevan. “And I think he would be appalled at how undermined it has been by consistent governments.”
Fuelled by the politician’s unshakable principles, Price considers a party’s stance on funding the NHS to be the most critical policy topic 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 arms sector, or is it healthcare and housing?”
Nye is at the National Theatre: Olivier, London, 24 February to 11 May (NT Live broadcast 23 April), and Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 18 May to 1 June; This Might Not Be It is at the Bush theatre, London, to 2 March.
