Review Roundup: What Did the Critics Think of Michael Sheen in NYE?

Michael Sheen is Nye Bevan in this surreal and spectacular journey through the life and legacy of the man who transformed Britain’s welfare state. Written by Tim Price and directed by Rufus Norris, The National Theatre's production of Nye is now open.

From campaigning at the coalfield to leading the battle to create the NHS, Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan is often referred to as the politician with greatest influence on our country without ever being Prime Minister.

Confronted with death, Nye’s deepest memories lead him on a mind-bending journey back through his life; from childhood to mining underground, Parliament and fights with Churchill in an epic Welsh fantasia.

What did the critics think?

Photo Credit: Johan Persson

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Gary Naylor, BroadwayWorld: Michael Sheen, in the part he was surely born to play, is on stage throughout, carrying the play and the man with equal passion. We see the charisma, the dynamism and bloody-mindedness that Clement Attlee (Stephanie Jacob) saw when he gave him the toughest job in his Cabinet. We also see the sentimentality, the performative working class chippiness and a laudable, perhaps guilty, pragmatism eventually poking through. Sheen catches Nye’s lightning in a bottle.   

Arifa Akbar, The Guardian: In a production written by Tim Price and directed by Rufus Norris, there is some inspired stagecraft as the hospital curtains of Vicki Mortimer’s ingenious set swish to reveal debating chambers and libraries. But the narrative is too long-reaching and schematic, its extensively researched material not fully absorbed dramatically.

Sarah Hemming, The Financial Times: A mighty, moving and sometimes messy piece of theatre, it’s really, at heart, a state-of-the-nation play. And like Dear England and Standing at the Sky’s Edge before it, Nye (a co-production with the Wales Millennium Centre) seizes this venue’s great potential as a national public forum to frame critical questions about who we are and who we want to be.

Clive Davis, The Times: There’s even a Singing Detective-style musical sequence where, still in his pyjamas, Sheen leads the cast through the swing-era standard Get Happy. (The composer Will Stuart’s score strikes a cheesy, multiplex note elsewhere.) The green curtains of Vicki Mortimer’s hospital ward set cleverly evoke the green benches of the Commons, as Bevan savages Tory politicians who are so villainous they probably lunch on babies.

Nick Curtis, The Standard: Nye’s challenges and triumphs are ticked off one by one. Guilt about his miner father dying of “black lung”? Check. Poverty and unemployment? Check. Becoming an autodidact, a campaigning councillor and a maverick socialist MP? Check, check, check.

Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph: Rufus Norris and his creative team attain a pulse-quickening theatricality, the ensemble as tightly drilled as an A&E team: hospital beds take on hallucinogenic properties, repurposed as doors or surreally upended, while yards of green hospital curtain achieve swishing transitions. Comic liberties are smartly taken, memorably when an irate Herbert Morrison attempts to smother Bevan with a pillow, but the death-bed climax is rousingly poignant.

Nye is at The National Theatre until 11 May

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