This is an audio introduction to our production of Nye, written by Tim Price and directed by Rufus Norris.

These include information about the pre-show touch tour, some background to the play and descriptions of the set, costume and characters. They are available as an audio file, as a word document and on in full on this web page for screen readers.

Play the audio file

The production lasts about 2 hours and 40 minutes, including a 20 minute interval.

Click here for the transcript of the audio file as a Word docx

It is also available here on this page:

Nye covers the life of politician and founder of the National Health Service, Aneurin Bevan.

After an operation, the elder statesman wakes up in a hospital bed. As Nye slips in and out of consciousness, the events his life return to him in a series of dream-like flash backs, that begin in his schooldays in the small Welsh mining town of Trodega in 1928, through his years as an MP in Westminster, to the creation of the very NHS where he finds himself.

Throughout, we never quite leave the hospital where the unconscious Nye is dreaming about his life, and bits of the ward are woven through the fabric of his flashbacks.

Four pairs of mint-green hospital curtains, which hang from tracks around six metres above the stage, divide the space into eight patient bays, four on the left, and four on the right that fill up the whole space, from front to back.  In each bay is a metal framed hospital bed. Bedside cabinets between each of them carry vases, with cheerful bunches daffodils inside, and there is a chair for visitors beside each patient. The beds all have pristine white sheets and blankets, and a clipboard carrying each patient’s medical notes attached to the foot of the bedframe. The feet of the beds face each other across the space, creating a corridor in the centre, where a matron’s desk has a view of the whole of the ward. Nurses mill about, checking on their patients, in a uniform that consists of a light blue shin-length dress, with a white apron pinned to the shoulders, and a black belt around the waist. They wear white hats with stiff peaks.

A dozen striplights hang over the stage, illuminating the spaces between the curtains.

As Nye’s dreams continue, changes in location are represented by the opening, closing, and the rising and falling of the hospital curtains. Sometimes they are shut, closing of the whole of the stage, and providing a screen for projected images. At others, they are open to create more space. The height of the curtains varies, too, rising high, almost out of sight, or lowering to be closer to the ground. The hospital beds are transformed into desks, library shelves, or speakers podiums, to create Nye’s hallucinatory memories.

There is a mixed heritage company of 24, including an ensemble of 18 performers. Many of the actors play more than one role.

The costumes reflect the times and locations that we visit. The men wear dark suit trousers and collared shirts. The women have short hair, or have it pinned up in a chignon, wearing calf length skirts and blouses. In the mining town of Trodega, the style is warm knitwear and sensible shoes for men and women, whilst at Westminster, the men are in tailored suits with waistcoats and ties (or bow-ties), and the women wear tighter clothes, nipped at the waist, and heeled shoes.

Aneurin Bevan, also know as Nye, is 63 years old when we first meet him.

He’s a fair skinned man with a fresh complexion and neatly cut grey hair, combed into a side parting. There’s an earnest vulnerability to Nye’s round face – for the whole of the play, he’s in the pyjamas he’s wearing in hospital, red with thin vertical blue stripes running through them. He pads around in bare feet with his left hand bandaged.

Nye’s Scottish wife, Jennie, is around the same age, a steely white woman with wavy grey hair. She wears a stylish burgundy coloured coat over a matching cardigan, with the white collar of her blouse showing over it. She wears a grey calf length pencil skirt  and suede burgundy coloured shoes. Her face is lighty made up with an accent of lipstick matching her clothes. At times she wears horn rimmed glasses on a chain.

Nye’s oldest friend, from childhood, is Archie, (or Lush, as a schoolboy). He’s a broad shouldered white man in late middle age, with greying neatly combed hair that’s thinning on top. Archie wears a chunky grey cardigan over a white shirt and grey suit trousers, his eyes framed with tortoiseshell glasses.

Other patients in the ward are all dressed in pyjamas and dressing gowns.

Dr. Dain is a tall, broad shouldered man with thinning, jet black hair, brown skin, and a round face. He wears a brown bowtie at the collar of his white shirt, and a white lab coat with a stethoscope hooked around his neck. His suit trousers are brown, and he wears brown leather shoes.

A Jamaican nurse, with dark brown skin and glossy black hair in a chignon, tends to Nye on the ward. Like all the other nurses, Nurse Ellie wears the blue nurse’s uniform. The same actress plays Nye’s sister, Arianwen, wearing a pink floral dress and light blue apron.

In a visit to Nye’s schooldays, his classmates are dressed in hard wearing practical clothes. The boys with arran knit jumpers and tank tops, and heavy cotton short  trousers. The girls have their hair in bows, or ringlets and wear pinafore dresses. All the children wear heavy leather boots.

The school teacher, Mr Orchard, is an elderly, wiry framed man with grey hair and a moustache, who peers over wire framed spectacles. He stands on a chair leaning on two cartoonishly long walking sticks. When he steps onto the floor the walking sticks are wielded like weapons and used to propel him, spider-like, across the space. He wears a lemon coloured shirt with white rounded collar, a red tie knotted neatly at his throat.

When Nye visits a slightly surreal library, wooden trollies are wheeled into the space, propelled by pram wheels. The top and bottom trays are crammed with books. Upright bookshelves are built onto the front of the trollies, each with five shelves of books.

The library is peopled with members of the public, some of whom carry a shelf of books in their hands, so that the books float around as though in mid air. At first, the shelves are held side on, so that the books are on top of one other. When someone wants to choose one, the shelf is turned length ways, so that the books are side by side.

Others pace around the space, reading from open books. They gather together in stylised choreographed moves, manipulating Nye like a puppet, lifting him into the air, as though flying in a dream.

Other settings have a similarly trippy quality to them: for example, at  a council meeting, Hopkins, Williams, and Morgan, three councillors, appear like a comedy trio, cut from the same cloth. Each has a bushy moustache and slicked down hair. They are grey suited and self-assured, but each of different heights, tall, medium and short. They speak from behind hospital beds-turned-podiums, each with a sleeper under the covers of the bed as it’s turned on its side or propped upright, the dream-logic seeming to defy gravity.

When we visit the House of Commons, the curtains close and lower down to a variety of heights, becoming the stepped benches of the chamber, with MPs standing behind them on different levels.

We meet a cast of familiar historical figures.

Winston Churchill is a tall broad shouldered man with a bald head and a light purple three piece suit with a bow tie at the collar of his white shirt. He speaks with a blustering voice and puffs incessently on a thick cigar.

Neville Chamberlain is a tall man with thinning grey hair and a thick moustache, who wears a tail coat, with a thin tie around his wing-collared white shirt.

Clement Atlee is a short, round faced man with a bald head and round framed glasses, wearing a blue three piece suit. Atlee puffs on a pipe, and literally drives his office desk around the place, his chair attached to it, so that he glides with quiet power across the space.

Deputy prime minister, Herbert Morrison, is a short statured man with broad shoulders and large expressive hands. He wears tortoiseshell framed glasses and a brown tank top, over a mint green shirt.

Often the miners from Nye’s home town of Trodega traipse through in shirts, trousers, and workboots, wearing tin helmets with torches in the front. Their clothes, like their faces, are stained with a layer of black coal.

Nye’s father, David, is also a miner. He’s a tall thin man with gaunt features obscured by coal dust, and lank collar-length hair which he wears without his miner’s helmet. Sometimes, he carries a paraffin lamp, wandering as a point of light through his son’s dreams.

Other roles are played by the company and will be described as they appear.

Cast and Production Credits

Aneurin, ‘Nye’, Bevan, Michael Sheen,

Jenny Lee, Sharon Small.

Archie Lush, Roger Evans

Doctor Dain and Winston Churchill, Tony Jayawardena.

Nurse Ellie and Arianwen, Kezrena James

Mr Orchard, Matthew Bulgo

Councillor Williams, Dyfan Dwyfor

Councillor Hopkins and David Bevan, Rhodri Meilir.

Councillor Morgan, Michael Keane.

Neville Chamberlain, Nicholas Khan.

Clement Attlee and Matron, Stephanie Jacob.

Herbert Morrison MP, John Furlong.

In the ensemble:

Remy Beasley, Ross Foley, Daniel Hawkesford, Bea Holland, Rebecca Killick, Oliver Llewellyn-Jenkins, Mark Matthews, Ashley Mejri, Lee Mango, David Monteith, Mali O’Donnell, Sarah Otung.

The sound designer is Donato Wharton.

The composer, Will Stuart.

Co-choreographers, Steven Hoggett and Jess Williams.

Lighting designer, Paule Constable.

Costume designer, Kinnetia Isidore.

Set designer, Vicki Mortimer.

Director, Rufus Norris.

Playwright, Tim Price.