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I, Daniel Blake: Ken Loach’s angry Palme d’Or winner fails to translate to the stage

David Nellist as Dan in I, Daniel Blake - Pamela Raith
David Nellist as Dan in I, Daniel Blake - Pamela Raith

This new touring adaptation of Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or-winning 2016 film was sold out at its launch-venue, Northern Stage, even before it opened this week.

That’s a testament to the fact that I, Daniel Blake is set in Newcastle and was filmed there. Its working-class hero is a local middle-aged joiner who falls through the supposed welfare safety net after a heart attack, encountering the benefits system at its most unsympathetic; he’s required to seek employment despite being told by his doctor he’s not ready to return to work. Its defining scene, in which the frail, exasperated Dan (played on screen by Tyneside comic Dave Johns) sprays his name on the wall of a city jobcentre, drawing crowds of onlookers, was shot a short walk from the theatre.

Local curiosity aside, on paper there’s plainly much ongoing topicality. Paul Laverty’s original screenplay was based on ample research but was still dismissed as “fiction” by Damian Green, then Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. Whatever your political persuasion, most people will be sufficiently concerned about the underdogs that Loach represents here (there but for the grace of God etc) to want to take another look at his particularised state-of-the-nation drama.

Which makes it such a pity that this version, by Johns himself, with direction by Mark Calvert, proves such a poor relation of the screen original. It’s not just the oddly drab and dingy mise-en-scène – a lot of low-level lighting and unsightly shelving units – it’s the way that, instead of being fleshed-out, the work has been given the most bare-bones theatrical development.

Some Tory big-wigs are heard defending the system, including Green, Cameron, May, and Johnson. Given Loach’s politics, you expect such framing but the opportunity to provide more context isn’t seized, including the possibility that systemic inflexibility might stem as much from bureaucratic callousness as top-down inhumanity.

A lot of the expressive nuance that Johns mustered on screen goes missing on stage. In the title role, David Nellist has the requisite air of bewilderment and embattlement but, intoning a lot of lines familiar from the original, he doesn’t have enough fresh meat to chew on. The computer-driven, Kafka-esque world he encounters is crying out for a spot of (youth-audience-appealing) physical dynamism, but on it all episodically plods – with a frustratingly sketchy indication of Dan’s ducking-and-diving young neighbour China (played here, as on screen, by Kema Sikazwe). Bryony Corrigan inevitably moves us as the downwardly spiralling single-mum so hungry she weepingly devours a can of food. But the whiff of thin gruel is inescapable.


In Newcastle until June 10 (tickets: 0191 230 5151; northernstage.co.uk), then touring until Nov (ett.org.uk)