Review of Nye at the National Theatre.
Tim Price’s new play Nye is both a retelling of the life of Aneurin Bevan and an attempt to re-mythologise his life’s achievement, the NHS. Central to both is the idea of the Masses. The mass of people is the great constant of Nye: Bevan is their champion, and they champion him. At the beginning of the play, the whole of Bevan’s primary school class mutinies in solidarity against a vicious schoolmaster. Bevan swamps his opponents in local government by inviting the masses in to barrack proceedings. And when he dies, it is the masses that enfold him, lifting him out of his hospital bed and into their embrace.
Price’s Bevan lives his life by a simple logic. That is: why shouldn’t society be set up to benefit these masses? This is politics at its most elemental. It’s stripped of all the abstractions that we’ve grown accustomed to. If millions of people don’t have enough to eat and can’t see a dentist, then why should we care about parliamentary procedure, or local government procedure, or foreign policy, or the learned criticisms of bodies like the British Medical Association?
To Price’s Bevan, these abstractions are trivial. They mean less than nothing in the face of the toiling majority and its problems. The play makes it fairly clear that we’re meant to find this endearing, overall. Though at times wrongheaded, it’s an example of simple homespun wisdom. It speaks to a child’s good-hearted sense of fairness, and indeed, at the moment of death, Price’s Bevan devolves into a kind of baby speak: “I feel safe. I feel people. People are nearby. Did I protect everyone?”
In making Nye a figure of simple egalitarian horse sense, Price hopes to recast him for our own time as a sort of advanced Brownite bruiser. A souped-up Tony Benn. A duly elected Samwise Gamgee. The play invites us to believe that his great achievement, the NHS, is just another example of this simple humanitarianism. Price’s Bevan says that the NHS, once established, will offer nothing more than “dignity” to the masses.
Why shouldn’t society be set up to benefit the masses? Again and again Nye invokes this thought, and it’s invoked for a very limited aim: as an apology for the particular state healthcare system as it exists in 2024.
But this is an explosive idea. It cannot be channelled towards such narrow ends. It cannot be assimilated to cuddly social democracy, and throughout the play Bevan keeps wandering off script and saying alarming things that he’s not supposed to. Price’s Bevan is thus an interesting example of a fictional subject escaping the control of its own creator.
For one, if the current order of things only condemns millions to misery and death, then can any defence of this order be allowed at all? Those involved in Nye doubtless believe that it should, but they are never able to persuade us why. Who dares stand between the Masses and their interests? No one good, apparently. Bevan’s opponents in this play, the representatives of the old order, are a series of freaks and reprobates. The logic of the play’s moral commitments means that they cannot be presented as anything else. Nye’s schoolmaster is not merely cruel but criminally insane, lashing out indiscriminately with a pair of canes, which he uses to crawl around the classroom like an immense spider. Churchill is a would-be generalissimo of Britain who laughs off the deaths of thousands of soldiers. The avatar of the Labour Right arrives in the person of Herbert Morrison, a gruesome pint-sized party manager who pins Nye to a hospital bed and screams in his ear about how his ideas are unworkable. Even Clem himself is a figure of menace, silently gliding around the stage on a motorised desk.
And by the same token, does such a worldview really have any room for democratic niceties? Price’s Bevan begins his political career by strong-arming Monmouthshire County Council into submission. “Politicians talk while people suffer,” he barks. Maybe so. It should probably be noted, however, that you cannot have anything approaching a liberal democracy if you trade too easily in this kind of crude majoritarianism. Price invokes the idea of the Masses for the myth-making of the NHS, but the idea quickly starts to consume the whole play, and his own protagonist usurps him.
Things come to a head when Price’s Bevan, during an argument with Churchill, blurts out that Britain’s war against the Third Reich is all in vain, as it’s only being waged by the country’s possessing classes in defence of their property. Again, the premises that the play has traded in leave us with no alternative to such a conclusion. Why should we care about the territorial integrity of Poland when children in Tredegar are coughing up soot? But here we are in some seriously uncharted waters. Britain’s involvement in the Second World War and the postwar settlement that followed are so closely bound up as to be inseparable; a heartening epic in which the country’s ancien régime, symbolised by Churchill, redeems itself by first refusing an accommodation with fascism, and then by acquiescing to the welfare state in 1945. Would the interests of Britain’s possessing classes have been better served by such an accommodation? It’s certainly a question that Bevan would have asked. But it isn’t one that the postwar settlement, and therefore modern British democracy, can really withstand.
The real reason why Bevan seems to spin out of Price’s control is that he is an alien man from an alien world. His idea, the politics of the Masses, is pure dynamite, a radioactive element from another age. No wonder it wreaks so much havoc here. Nye Bevan passed his days in the era of crowd politics and of mass mobilisation. When Nye was 20 a mob stormed the Winter Palace. When he was 21, hundreds of thousands of brutalised German war veterans organised themselves into motley ‘Free Corps’ and did battle with Communists for control of the streets. This was an age where Adolf Hitler, a broken down man in a threadbare suit, could simply make a few speeches in his local beer hall and attract a wildly devoted personal following. This was an age in which even liberal democracies like France had a quarter of its total population in arms by 1918. Such an age, in its energy and its brutality, is simply inconceivable to us now. Classes, nations, races; all were mobilised and at daggers drawn. At one point in Nye our hero exclaims that he’s going to read all about Dialectical Materialism, and there was a slight guffaw from the audience. To us, terms like these are quaint historical curios. But for the people of Bevan’s age they were anything but. People sent and were sent to death camps over these terms.
These years were the final climax of pure Democracy, in which the masses could elect people that would carry out their sovereign will and not be countermanded by things like law courts, the EU, the ECHR, the UN or modern ideas of human rights. More often than not, the first thing the masses did with this power was to elect someone who promised to dispense with the democratic niceties and to make himself their sole instrument. It was an appeal that could run to the Right or Left; just as Bevan, an early ally of Oswald Mosley, really could’ve ended up in either camp. “Politicians talk while people suffer” is the slogan of Price’s Bevan, sure. It is also the slogan of Caesar, of Louis-Napoleon, of Huey Long, of the Bohemian Corporal.
Our own age is allergic to such appeals. It is vigilant against anything that remotely smacks of it. For better or worse, we do not live in an age of demagoguery, but of oligarchy. Bevan was frustrated enough at having to deal with the Cabinet system. Think of what he would have made of the Supreme Court, or the Office for Budget Responsibility. Things like Nye’s headlong charge against the BMA would not run in 2024; indeed, the whole programme of Keir Starmer and Sue Gray is to give such bodies a virtual veto over democratic legislation.
And so our age cannot take a figure like Nye Bevan for its hero, no more than the supposed defender of norms Joe Biden can ever really invoke FDR – the four-term incumbent and great scourge of the Supreme Court, who in his inaugural address demanded the powers of a General resisting an invasion.
Nor should it. What if the Masses really did rule? In Nye, this question is meant to act as an apology for the status quo. But ironically, those who defend this status quo have the absolute least reason to find out.
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