By Aline Mahrud

WORTH A LOOK?: *****

WHEN?: Saturday 24 February, opens 6 March and runs through 11 May 2024 RUNTIME: 160 minutes (including a 20-minute interval) Ticket update: Nye returns for a 2nd run at the National 3 July through 16 August 2025 Tickets

A grieving son wraps his dying miner father in his arms, apologises for everything he could have done better to look after him and vows to make good by helping others.

• Read on for reasons including how Nye offers insight into a man who shaped our country and influenced the people we became

The son is Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan, the Labour politician and founder of the National Health Service on 5 July 1948, and Nye is the warts-and-all story of the man who would improve the health of countless millions of us and how he did it.

Nye died almost 12 years to the day he founded the NHS from stomach cancer and the conceit here is that he’s in hospital at the end of his life having a fever dream and wanders, pink pyjama-clad, through moments of importance.

Reading the article by former Labour leader Neil Kinnock in the programme about Bevan we discover his education was cut short at 13 when he followed his miner father down the pits to work in 1910.

In an almost reverse of film Dead Poets Society we meet the bullying schoolteacher who would cane a young Nye because of his speech impediment, the classmates who would protect him and the very Manic Street Preachers-like realisation that free libraries could give him the power to overcome his stammer by finding alternative words to those he could not utter.

Riffing on Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective Sheen’s Nye even sings Judy Garland’s Get Happy at 1 point as he and his miner colleagues use the time unemployment has afforded them to bone up on the way their home town of Tredegar in Wales is run and get themselves elected onto the boards of the bodies involved to finally do good by its people.

From our 4th row seats we see director Rufus Norris, also outgoing artistic director and chief executive of the National Theatre, tread the boards at the beginning of this 1st preview to remind us as such there might have to be a pause in proceedings because of the freshness of the material but perhaps 1 of the reasons its star Sheen is beaming so much during the curtain call (see picture below) is because it all actually went so well.

The action is staged as if in a hospital ward for much of the time with beds on wheels used to great effect and curtains around beds featuring prominently and at 1 point, rather brilliantly, lowering to become rows of seats in Parliament.

Tony Jayawardena (Marjorie Prime, Menier) is seemingly effortlessly charismatic as Nye’s nemesis Winston Churchill, a man who succeeds in doing what Labour were unable to by uniting all classes in opposition to world war.

Sharon Small (Good, Harold Pinter Theatre) is more than a match for a revelatory performance by Sheen, at 1 point seemingly channelling the boyish enthusiasm of a young Declan Donnelly from Ant and Dec, as she explains the sacrifices she made to support her husband.

There’s a lot of injustice to make the audience angry here and there’s some terrific political theatre in London at the moment to both challenge the mind and make the heart soar – An Enemy Of The People and Standing At The Sky’s Edge for example.

Like the outstanding Dear England, this is an example of a venue at the top of its game doing exactly what it should be doing in offering insight into stories of those who have shaped our country and influenced the people we have become.

• Main picture via Facebook courtesy National Theatre Tickets
• Have you seen a Michael Sheen show before and what did you think of this 1? Let us know what you thought in the comments below
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