The end is Nye

One Welsh legend (Aneurin "Nye" Bevan), played by another (Michael Sheen), on the Wales Millennium Centre's biggest stage? When the National Theatre's Nye came to Cardiff for a second time late last month, it was always going to be box office gold.

Tim Price's play tells the story of Bevan's greatest achievement - the establishment of the NHS - but does so by tracing what made him the man he was, and the obstacles that stood in his way: his upbringing in the working-class community of Tredegar; a childhood stammer that affected his confidence about speaking in class; his father's affliction with the miner's curse, black lung; the scorn of the establishment; the resistance of doctors and the British Medical Association to his plans.

Sheen's Bevan is a feisty character fired by injustice, urging unity in the fight for rights, but he retains a cheeky charm, even in skirmishes with the likes of Winston Churchill. Having recently read David Peace's The Damned Utd and rewatched Sheen's turn as football manager Brian Clough in the film adaptation, I found it hard not to see parallels between the two historical figures: larger than life, charismatic, egocentric, stubborn, defiant.

The play isn't an unmitigated triumph - some of the jokes are of the sort calculated to provoke polite performative theatre laughter rather than genuine guffaws, and the scene in which Archie Lush introduces his schoolboy pal Nye to the joys of borrowing books feels a bit too much like a crude dramatisation of the Manics' famous line "Libraries gave us power".

But Sheen is a tour de force, capturing a character at several different points throughout his life, and the supporting cast are strong. The staging is imaginative, most notably when the hospital curtains are transformed into the benches in the House of Commons. (I also very much enjoyed Clement Attlee's motorised desk - which admittedly sounds like the name of a racehorse from The Day Today.)

Nye's message is in many ways uplifting, illustrating the positive change that can be achieved through vision, determination and collective action. And yet it begins with Bevan in hospital, incapacitated on what turns out to be his deathbed, and the whole story is told as a series of hallucinations. He never makes it out of his pyjamas. 

Just as Bevan is ailing, so is his creation. The play trumpets the fact that, since the advent of the NHS, life expectancy in the UK has increased significantly. What it doesn't spell out is that life expectancy is now in decline, and a health service undermined by decades of underfunding seems to be on its last legs. In the current climate, Nye is - inevitably - a politically charged play; to celebrate the NHS is to implicitly draw critical attention to how it is being dismantled.