Page 140 - ASMF Marriner 100 Coverage Book

Nye, at the National Theatre until May 11, couldn’t be more different. Tim

Price’s headlong canter through the life of Nye Bevan, firebrand Welsh
politician and architect of the NHS, starts at the end, with Bevan (played,

inevitably, by The Welsh Actor Michael Sheen), dying of stomach cancer in
an NHS hospital (he actually died at home after a spell in the Royal Free but
that doesn’t tie up so neatly).

The doctors and nurses transform into figures from his past - Clement Attlee,
Winston Churchill, his sister Arianwen - as Bevan goes in and out of
consciousness, reliving episodes in his remarkable life and the fight to bring

universal healthcare to Britain (the least keen were the doctors, who were
pissed off at the prospect of losing their lucrative private practice).

It’s slightly mad (at one point there’s a totally unexpected song and dance

number) but it’s fascinating and never boring, and it has the excellent Sharon
Small in it as Bevan’s wife, the Scottish politician Jennie Lee, who gave up
her own promising career to support him.

It seems unthinkable now that before Bevan conceived the idea, hardworking
people were simply allowed to suffer or die needlessly due to their inability
to pay medical fees. I’ve spent the last three weeks in the US and I’m still

baffled that this is a thing in an ostensibly advanced democracy, though
perhaps at this point the less said about that the better.

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I mentioned the painter Che Lovelace last week, whose gorgeous work I

discovered in the Dulwich Picture Gallery exhibition Soulscapes. I’ve since
found out that you can also now see his work at the entrance of St James’s

Church Piccadilly, in a new commission to commemorate the prominent
abolitionist Quobna Ottobah Cugoano.

Cugoana was one of the first enslaved people to write and publish a text in
English, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the

Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Humbly Submitted to the