‘Nye’: bad history, bad drama and a flawed hero

Why is it so hard to make politics come to life on stage?  Political films often seem to work, as biopics about Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair and the Queen showed. Political comedy from Yes Minister to The Thick of It is in fine fettle.

To be sure the Chamber of the House of Commons is very often brilliant, engrossing theatre. George W. Bush watched the Iraq War debate in 2003 and later did not quite believe Tony Blair when the then PM assured the President that he had no prior notice of the questions thrown at him by MPs from all sides.

But plays about politics on stage hardly ever seem to work. The latest, Nye, is on at Britain’s most prestigious theatrical setting: the sprawling, soaring Olivier Theatre in the National Theatre. The play fails on all fronts.

It is about the great hero of the Labour Left: a Welsh coalminer, whose oratory, Winston Churchill told Jonathan Aitken, surpassed his own. Aneurin “Nye” Bevan, a leader of the 1926 general strike before he was 30, a young Labour MP in 1929, a soaring left-winger far bigger in vision, history and political possibilities than Tony Benn or Jeremy Corbyn, came to dominate the Left of the Labour Party for three decades, from 1930 to 1960.

Clement Attlee treated Bevan much as Sir Keir Starmer is treating Jeremy Corbyn. In 1939 the Labour leader withdrew the whip from the Welsh firebrand, along with Sir Stafford Cripps, the highest paid KC of the day. Both had called for a common front of unity, including communists, against the menace of right-wing racist nationalism, by then triumphant in Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain.

Stalin’s joint invasion of Poland with Hitler in 1939 solved that problem. Once Russia was invaded by Stalin’s erstwhile ally in Berlin, Cripps was sent to Moscow as British Ambassador.  Bevan remained in the Commons, constantly sniping at Churchill, even in the crisis years of 1940-42. Bevan said of the PM: “He wins vote after vote but loses battle after battle.”

Nonetheless Attlee made Cripps his Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1945 and also put Bevan in the postwar Labour Cabinet as Minister of Health. Bevan took the blueprint for a statist, top-down health service drawn up by the Liberal William Beveridge.

Overnight, so it seemed, no-one had to pay for health care, GP’s visits and hospital stays, spectacles and dentures were free, and children had nurseries and NHS orange juice.

The NHS is the jewel in the crown of Labour’s postwar history. Bevan, like his near namesake Ernest Bevin, Attlee’s Foreign Secretary,  was never interested in learning from Europe. The social democratic and socialist governments on the Continent after 1945 also set up free health care systems, but based on compulsory social insurance and controlled by professional administrators and doctors, not state bureaucrats.

The NHS was approved by the Treasury under the austere Stafford Cripps. He hated the idea of mutual, community-based, or self-governed health care systems. It was the State or nothing.

Today Germany spends 3 per cent more of GDP on health care than Britain, including setting up a complete old age care support Pflegeversicherung (care insurance) on a cross party basis. This guarantees that no one has to pay for old age care from home visits, spa treatments to nursing for dementia.

The play Nye is by the Welsh playwright Tim Price. He has written plays on Scottish independence, Bradley Manning, Occupy demonstrations and has been ticking boxes for leftist themes since 2010. Price romanticises Bevan from his early school days. In the play he organises a rebellion against a bossy English teacher, walking around with a 4-foot cane to hit boys for making mistakes in school. I remember being caned for not getting my Latin subjunctives under control, so I couldn’t quite share the playwright’s enthusiasm for the importance of this early and interminable scene in the play.

He has Bevan ranting in the Commons against Neville Chamberlain, who is only remembered for appeasing Hitler, but as a housing and health minister was actually a major reformer. He launched a giant slum clearance programme in 1938 and imposed rent controls – all good Bevanite policies.

The audience at the National Theatre all seemed familiar. I realised they were largely the same people I saw in 1993, when I went to the National to see David Hare’s political play The Absence of War, a thinly disguised  account of Neil Kinnock’s failure to defeat the Tories and his quarrels with his former left-wing CND and anti-EEU comrades.

Now, like me, they are 30 years older and the National’s hearing devices seemed very popular. This was the Guardian’s retiree reading classes going to the theatre.

We had been told Nye Bevan was the greatest ever Labour hero. His biography was written by the hero-worshiping Michael Foot, who inherited Bevan’s seat of Ebbw Vale when the former Health Minister died of stomach cancer in 1960.

Bevan had walked out of Attlee’s government a decade previously when some modest charges on spectacles were imposed to try and balance the books, as Britain rearmed to be America’s faithful bag-carrier in the Korean War. It made Bevan the hero in the 1950s of the Left, including the powerful communist faction in the trade unions and amongst fellow-travelling intellectuals and academics, who faithfully conveyed whatever the Kremlin decided should be global policy.

But it seriously weakened the Labour Party, which was out of power from 1951 to 1964, as Bevan and his wing of the party failed to read the social changes of a postwar Britain that was by then far removed from the 1920s and 1930s.  Similarly Michael Foot’s and Tony Benn’s espousal of Bevanite doctrines on Europe, support for Arthurs Scargill, or contempt for working class men and women who wanted to better their lives, kept Labour in opposition 1979-1997.

Apart from a passing reference to Bevan’s non-stop womanising, the play explores none of the contradictions inherent in seeking, gaining, and using power for progressive ends.

In a rather desperate effort to make the play, well, more playful, Bevan spends his hours on stage dressed in red striped pyjamas with a very odd wig. He leads his school mates in a ballet in a public library. The first act closes with a song and dance number in a hospital ward, which had the audience cringing in embarrassment.

I could not take much more and left after the first act. The politics was wrong, the history was incorrect and if any members of a future Labour Cabinet were present, they would have learnt nothing useful about the challenges that lie ahead.

In his maiden speech to the Commons Bevan castigated Parliament as a place of ancestor worship. It is a good description of the play Nye.

Denis MacShane was a Labour MP for 18 years. His book Labour Takes Power: the Denis MacShane Diaries 1997-2001 is published by Biteback.

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