'Fever Dream': Tim Price's Nye, starring Michael Sheen, center. Photo: Johan Persson
There is no better time to reflect on the idea that British society can be reshaped and to look at the beginnings of the welfare state. Last week with Lucy Kirkwood The human body delivered a merry-go-round version of life after World War II, seen through the eyes of a female doctor. Now Tim Price's new play, in co-production with the Wales Millennium Centre, looks at the inspiring achievements of Aneurin "Nye" Bevan, the Welsh troublemaker who founded the NHS. It's a missed opportunity.
No is a feverish dream. Beginning in 1960, with 62-year-old Bevan in a hospital bed, the drama returns episodically: to school days and memories of the miner's father who died of pneumoconiosis ('black lung disease'), from trade union and council activities, to the beautiful transformative work as health minister that made him a beacon of the left.
The form is fractured and dizzying: Vicki Mortimer's design creates a hallucinatory blend, with the institutional green of hospital curtains sweeping effortlessly into the ranks of the House of Commons. Yet the dialogue is persistent and instructive. Interesting nuggets become a mechanical explanation: his father's suffering gave Bevan the legacy of wanting to care for everyone; The terrible bullying by a teacher awakened his sense of injustice.
Sheen's performance is fiery but not indulgent, conveying the man's strength and his purring, self-mocking humor.
In the theatrical equivalent of the nervous giggle that comes over one upon hearing bad news, Rufus Norris's production is infected with a terrible laziness that goes beyond conveying the strangeness of fever. At each particularly didactic moment, the furniture starts to move. Hospital beds are constantly folded up so that their occupants stand jauntily vertical. When Clement Attlee (played enigmatically by Stephanie Jacob sounding like Margaret Thatcher) persuades Bevan to follow the health instruction, his desk swings around the stage to corner him. Doctors who oppose the idea of the NHS, Tory politicians with long faces and overworked vowels are pop-up villains.
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Bevan belonged to that interesting group: the fluent stutterer. Jonathan Miller, Christopher Hitchens and the Observer's own Philip French were other brilliant members. No convincingly shows that the orator's celebrated eloquence was a direct result of the difficulty that made his early life miserable. In an effort to avoid words that began with unpronounceable consonants, he plundered books for synonyms and acquired a rich vocabulary.
In an excellent program essay, Neil Kinnock describes Bevan's delivery as "a mixture of brief hesitation and categorical emphasis". Michael Sheen could have exaggerated this with his silky speed; he does not. His performance is fiery but not indulgent, conveying (even in thick, pink pajamas) the man's strength, the engine of his conviction, and - in pursuing his future wife, Jennie Lee - his purring, self-deprecating humor. . He has a match in Sharon Small's Lee: fearless, visionary but tense and steeped in regret for sacrificing her ambition for her husband's career. It's a shame she isn't shouted out more (shouting was what she enjoyed): Lee later became a Member of Parliament and was celebrated not despite, but because of, his Minister of Arts. That seems almost unbelievable now. Like the idea of fully funded healthcare.
Let's hear it for Roy Williams, whose plays - leaning towards documentary but leaping imaginatively, often focusing on the lives of black British men and women - have been seducing and engaging audiences for thirty years. He has delivered state-of-the-nation drama Death of EnglanD; a gripping crime series on Radio 4, The interrogation; a one-time hit Sucker punch. Now he delivers an essential adaptation of Sam Selvon's wonderful 1956 novel The lonely Londoners capturing moments from the lives of the Windrush generation.
Selvon's fiction - wry and clear-eyed - is a steady chronicle with an exceptionally smooth, distinctive style. It seems, in Trinidadian patois, to speak straight from the hearts of the characters; it contains a meandering stream-of-consciousness passage that Virginia Woolf (who did not write in Trinidadian patois) would have envied.
Landladies and employers slam the door; children point; guys huddle together. Main characters jump off the stage as well as the page. Romario Simpson's Galahad is simple, slim and pretends to be smart while mangling London names like Ladbroke Grave. As Moses, Gamba Cole beams with hope and sadness, takes newcomers into his bed and teaches them not to look people in the eye (that scares white people) and to catch and cook pigeons. Tobi Bakare is somber and collected as Lewis: his disappointment sours into jealousy; he beats his wife.
Williams gives welcome extra space to the voices of women, who practice tongue twisters and argue with market traders, and delicately captures the role of male camaraderie: challenging, stimulating and necessary. Ebenezer Bamgboye's production is smooth, but smooths out some rough edges with artful slo-mo twists. Laura Ann Price's pulsating orange design is not reminiscent of 1950s fog: it does evoke the fervor of London's new citizens, many of whom have been invited to England to work at Bevan's NHS; betrayed many.
There is much to be grateful for Hadestown, the musical composed by Anaïs Mitchell in 2006, which ends up in the West End after a stint at the National and a hit on Broadway. This rewiring of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has inviting dark raspy tones, brass and soul and a great train track. The moment when Zachary James - the boss of hell - lets out his thumping bass about his intention to build walls to keep out the unwanted now seems like a prescient piece of electioneering. Gloria Onitiri's Persephone - with jazz in her voice, a hip flask in her décolleté and legs and arms made of elastic long stretch - is magnetizing.
Rachel Chavkin's production pushes the music world forward, but doesn't remake it. Dónal Finn and Grace Hodgett Young, like Orpheus and Eurydice, have sweet voices, but are not powerful enough to make the audience resist Hades' pull. The stage is so tight that Orpheus's return from the underworld seems small and stationary: he could be swinging through one of the hairpin bends in front of the Eurostar.
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No runs until May 11 at the Olivier, National Theatre, London
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The lonely Londoners runs until April 6 at the Jermyn Street Theater in London
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Hadestown is at the Lyric, London; booking until December 22
