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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Isn’t this criminal collusion between a government minister and an extremist Green organisation?
Blatant stitch-up.
They are in the bubble of ‘there is no truth but my truth’ therefore this patent act of self harm for our nation passes by as ‘doing the right thing by the World’.
As with failing to commit to nuclear in 2010, the seeds of our destruction are sown by those who will be affected least by the consequences.
It is “doing the right thing” by the UN and WEF. It essentially means our own politicians are happy to impoverish us by removing reliable affordable energy so they can get a little gold star on their lapel from the Technocrats and their Sustainable Development Agenda that thinks western standard of living is too high.——– Because the west became prosperous using fossil fuels and because they are a finite resource we are to STOP using them and the excuse for that is climate change. But once you look into this issue you find it is only a smidgeon of the truth elevated into a planetary emergency for political purposes.
follow the money
How can these decisions be made while all 650 skiving C-nts are on the beach ???
We knew what these duffers were going to do.
We knew that the ‘pot bangers’ needed a dose of all this.
Next May we will see what the ‘if it saves one life’ merchants make of all this self indulgent, virtue signalling idiocy as it kicks them in the trossachs.
What’s due in May ?
Yes, Millibrain truly has several screws loose.
Out of curiosity and off topic, is there anyone with an opinion on what currency or commodity to buy into? Seems like the pound and dollar are due for a collapse…
Silver, and keep it under the mattress.
Gold or silver with Monetary Metals in Arizona. They do leases and bonds on silver and gold that pay interest in gold.
I have no stake only because I cannot sfford 10 ounces of gold.
Gold is free of capital gains tax and VAT.
The collective insanity of these parasites borders on treason. They are selling their country out
It has crossed the border and is an illegal immigrant there. It deserves swift and firm action.
Ah yes, I’ll take that segue, thanks. Immigrants…I can’t quite believe this. Well I can, but I’m as incredulous as these ladies, to be honest. They obviously have money to burn. ”Erm..erm, uh…” This bloke can hardly construct a sentence and rivals Kamala Harris in the basic art of speech;
”Insane exchange where it transpires The Government are always paying for 5,000 empty hotel beds “just in case” they need them for illegal immigrants.
The meeting delegates can’t quite believe what they’re hearing.”
https://x.com/BGatesIsaPyscho/status/1828565487141224457
Much better to talk about the portrait of Thatcher!
Welcome to the UK – twinned with Venezuela
at least Venzuela is interested in accessing and monetizing its Oil & Gas resources
Watch: Colorado Residents Sound Alarm as Venezuelan GANGS TAKE OVER Entire Apartment Complex (infowars.com)
Yes, and here’s what the Venezuelans are doing in the USA:
BREAKING VIDEOS: Illegal Alien Hordes Now Hijacking School Buses As Apartment Complexes Across US Are Taken Over By Armed Venezuelan Gangs! (infowars.com)
Shock Video: Venezuelan ‘Migrant’ Delivering for Amazon Runs Over Mother Pushing Stroller, Flees Scene (infowars.com)
And here’s what the Marxist Pope says about it, as he is pictured here washing their feet:
Pope Francis says Deliberately Opposing Migration ‘Is a Grave Sin’ (infowars.com)
As Alex Jones pointed out, have you seen the huge walls of the Vatican? The Marxist Pope houses no illegal aliens there, and the Vatican is well protected by those walls.
This sets the precedent that any half wit climate activist can sue you for anything whatsoever that they claim affects climate. —-eg Having a car. Flying in a plane to Tenerife. (or Davos) Eating a fillet steak. Not getting a heat pump. Not getting a Smart Meter. Infact everything that humans do involves the release of some CO2 which means that every human activity can be challenged by lunatic activists, but also by pretend to save the planet politicians who know that controlling CO2 gives them the power to control every human activity, and that is what Climate Change policies are really for, with climate simply the excuse for that eco socialism.
Why place a handful of neat riggs in these North Sea fields producing reliable and efficient fuel for reliable and efficient ICE vehicles when you could instead smother them with hundreds of monstrous, bird-shredding, inefficient and unreliable jumped up windmills producing intermittent power for inefficient and unreliable jumped-up Scalextric cars?
I mean, come on…
This is the most dangerous human being in the UK, and the only reason he now has this power over our well being and prosperity is because the Conservatives turned into just another bunch of Liberals and truly made a pigs ear of an 80 seat majority to allow these cretinous goons that not so many voted for to now have us over an eco socialist barrel
—-I am warning everyone now that you will be forced into having a smart meter and a heat pump, petrol and diesel will be taxed to kingdom come and everything in your shopping trolley will be assessed for its carbon footprint, and all because…….the Tories made a total hash of it.
“and all because…….the Tories made a total hash of it.”
That implies they wanted to do the right thing. There is no evidence of that.
That was quite a subtle reply. ———But you know what I mean.
Yeah, no criticism Varmint, just that as time goes on you increasingly, reluctantly draw the conclusion that almost no politician or associated hanger-on is in it for the good of the people or country (any more). Quite the opposite.
And quite sobering and depressing.
Or as Mark Twain said “Politicians are like diapers, they need changed often and for the same reason”. —–They don’t work for us anymore. They work for the UN/WEF.
I like that quote. But the canvassing bloke who knocked at my door prior to this last election, did not, which makes me smile even more every time I hear or read the quote
With Labour set to make another tax raid on the oil and gas industry, you wonder whether Equinor and Shell were actually going to develop these fields in the next 5 years anyway.
A bit riçh of ClaireCoutinho.