A Judy Garland rendition, dancing nurses, a star lead: no spectacle is spared in Tim Price’s new play Nye, which tells the story of Aneurin (Nye) Bevan, the architect of the National Health Service. The drama opens with Bevan being cared for on an NHS ward, slipping in and out of consciousness, on the brink of death. For the nearly three hours that follow, his sickness and his morphine drip plunge him into his ‘deepest memories’, portrayed as a ‘Welsh fantasia’ that tells the story of his life and his creation.

Welsh heavyweight Michael Sheen takes on one of the most notable Welsh politicians in modern British history. He captures Bevan at every stage of life: the schoolboy who is abused by his headmaster and struggles with a stutter; the socialist activist; the coal miner; the Labour MP; and finally the health and housing minister under Clement Attlee who transforms the health service. The playfulness and slight nervousness Sheen brings to the role is convincing in Bevan’s earlier years. His wide-eyed wonder is particularly moving in a library sequence, when he works to overcome his stutter. The attributes start to feel strained in Bevan’s later life, standing up to Winston Churchill during the war and battling with the doctor’s union when launching the NHS – not helped by the wardrobe department insisting Sheen walks around barefoot and wears pyjamas throughout.

But Sheen, despite a commanding performance, is the second-biggest star in this National Theatre production. The main character is the system itself: the idea, the ‘dream of the NHS’ which is presented only as a positive development. Strange, then, that this ‘dream’ often comes across as a nightmare.

Yes, the staging is designed to be surreal. Suspension of disbelief is pushed to its maximum when Sheen starts to sing ‘Get Happy’, while patients and doctors break into dance, reminiscent of the NHS tribute in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics. Sometimes it’s pushed past its limits. There is a ratio of at least one doctor or nurse per NHS patient; fresh flowers are placed next to every NHS hospital bed.

But the surreal often strays into the sinister. The fluorescent, green-tinted lights feel claustrophobic. The ambulance sirens – and frequent, unexplained crashing and banging – keep you on edge. The scene at the start of the second act, with a single bed centred under vast strip lights, looked better suited to a production of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The attempt to draw a contrast between Bevan’s father’s death, which happens before universal access to healthcare is introduced, and his own fails badly. The former is violent, the latter is a dance, yet both are eerie.

Nye is not a nuanced play. The portrayal of heroes and villains borders on panto. When a figure who opposes the NHS tries to smother someone who supports it with a pillow, you could hear giggling in the audience. In one exchange between Bevan and Churchill (the show’s bad guy), Bevan insists ‘no one dares say anything because everyone worships you like a god’. The parallel to the modern deification of the NHS is striking but never acknowledged. (The production doubles down on the veneration at the end with a list of NHS ‘achievements’ projected onto the stage.)

For a play supposedly centered on the creation of the NHS, it’s odd that the formation is covered only in the final third. But the idea is always present. Hospital beds serve as school benches and podiums in local council halls; the waves of an electrocardiogram outline the coal mines. An allegory, if there ever was one, for how much the NHS has come to dominate politics and personal lives since Bevan founded it 76 years ago. A lot of the audience – dozens of whom are statistically very likely to be on a waiting list themselves right now – will see this clearly. Those in the production seem far less aware.<//>