A U.S. stage premiere of ‘I, Daniel Blake’ is filled with pathos

From left, Makara Gamble, JD Cullum, Philicia Saunders / Cooper Bates

LOS ANGELES — Many readers, including myself, will recall the pathos and power of the 2016 Ken Loach film I, Daniel Blake. A stage version premiered in May 2023 at the Northern Stage, Newcastle upon Tyne in Northern England, where the film and now the play are set. After a sold-out run, the play went on a national tour throughout Great Britain, winning the UK Theatre Awards for “Excellence in Touring” and “Best Writer” (playwright Dave Johns). The UK Guardian called the play “Chilling…highlights the realities of an inflexible system that does not recognize individual needs, nor allow space for compassion.”

American audiences, beginning in L.A., now have the opportunity to experience this heartbreaking story adapted from the Palme d’Or and BAFTA award-winning film written by Paul Laverty. Simon Levy directs this clarion call for human decency that London Theatre calls “an ode to the working class.” Performances take place through November 24 at the Fountain Theatre, home to one of the city’s most progressive and thoughtful repertories of social conscience. Fatherland, which premiered at the Fountain a few months ago, is now enjoying a good run off-Broadway in New York.

Although set in the present (“Now”) I, Daniel Blake evokes the pitiless ethos of vulture capitalism that started flowering anew in the time of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and that is, alas, still very much with us. It’s positively Kafkaesque in its representation of a soulless, uncaring, unfeeling bureaucracy created to crush hope and human dignity. For many of us—and I name myself as one—so often baffled and angered by the overwhelming demands of the insistently online culture, the torture of waiting endlessly for someone we can talk to to pick up the phone, to respond like a human being instead of a robot, is almost unbearable. How can we possibly calculate the numbers of people who have simply given up on their rights, their benefits, their entitlements and access, out of frustration with an inhuman system that persists on sending them, like Sisyphus, again and again back to square one?

JD Cullum, Philicia Saunders, and Makara Gamble star in this timely, poignant story. (Will a time ever come when a play like this is not “timely?”) Daniel Blake (JD Cullum) is a decent, warm-hearted middle-aged man, a lonely widower with no children, a skilled carpenter who’s always relied on his two good hands and now suddenly finds himself, diagnosed with a heart condition, unable to work. Katie (Philicia Saunders) has been sent up from London, where there’s no more public housing available, to Newcastle, where she and her teenage daughter Daisy (Makara Gamble) have been assigned a seedy, unheated two-bedroom flat. We meet them as they arrive, searching for the address and hoping for a fresh new start. On the street, they encounter the amiable Daniel, and the three become a kind of makeshift family of outcasts together attempting to navigate the nightmarish unemployment and public housing system while clinging to their dignity and humanity.

Playing a number of subsidiary roles such as policemen and -women and various robotic bureaucrats, the ensemble also includes Janet Greaves, Wesley Guimarães, and Adam Segaller. Guimarães is especially convincing as Daniel’s neighbor with big dreams of striking it rich, starting off with a few pairs of Chinese knockoff sneakers he’s trying to hawk on the street: “I’m going to be an entrepreneur,” he says, caressing the word as he would a lover’s thigh. It’s rough, he says, trying to get by in a union-busting, zero-hour contract, “self-employed,” disposable workforce economy. Plenty of Americans can relate to that.

The play is salted with several lyrical episodes where characters remember their past, sometimes fondly, sometimes bitterly. A series of incidents reveals how well-meaning, harmless individuals are reduced to selling off their meager assets just to keep eating. Everything in this broken system seems contrived to make life harder for people. And at the unemployment office they spotlight insulting signs saying, “Dreams Don’t Work Unless You Do” and “Unleash Britain’s Potential.” It’s no wonder that when Maggie Thatcher finally kicked the bucket, the radio stations kept playing, “Ding, dong, the witch is dead.”

“I, Daniel Blake carries an heroic urgency for this election season,” says director Simon Levy. “How many of us are literally one paycheck from disaster? It’s about people working together to help each other, to lift each other up, to not give in to despair. Daniel is a working-class hero, a person of hope and humor who is moved to fight the system and stand up for himself and others.”

At the opening night reception where theatergoers were able to mingle with the cast, we congratulated JD Cullum on his lead performance. He answered by saying this role was a stretch for him as he usually plays comic parts. That comment prompted me to think of him—Daniel Blake, that is—as a kind of contemporary Chaplin grappling with both social and mechanical systems bigger than himself, while still holding onto what little pride and character were left to him.

Blake is caught on the prongs of an existential Orwellian dilemma. On the one hand, he has been ordered by a doctor to stop working, and on the other, he is required to register for training sessions, CV guidance, and work-searching strategies which he must prove in order to qualify for unemployment. Truly, there is no rest for the weary. And then, ground down to the end of his patience, he’s accused as a scrounger and a scoundrel for trying to sponge off the public dole. Can’t win for losing. Reminds me of the Joe Glazer song “Too Old to Work and Too Young to Die.” And of the President Donald Trump’s response to COVID: “I swear he and his one-tenth of the one percent friends wanted to kill off as many old people as they could to cut back on all the Social Security checks.”

The one-act, 90-minute play moves swiftly along, despite the interminable waiting for someone to answer the telephone. One is struck immediately by the set, a gritty urban tenement atmosphere covered in coal dust. The show opens with a clip of a British Parliamentarian who’s questioned as to how real the filmic story of I, Daniel Blake is, and he hesitates not a second in pronouncing it merely “a work of fiction.” Millions of Brits who saw their own story in Daniel Blake’s must have found that assessment well off the mark.

The creative team includes scenic designer Joel Daavid; lighting designer Alison Brummer; sound designer Cricket S. Myers; video designer Nicholas Santiago; costume designer Michael Mullen; properties designer Jenine MacDonald; movement director Allison Bibicoff; and dialect coaches Carla Meyer and Victoria Hanlin. The production stage manager is Anna Kupershmidt, assisted by Gina DeLuca. Stephen Sachs and James Bennett produce for the Fountain Theatre. The executive producers are Carrie Menkel-Meadow and Robert Meadow.

I, Daniel Blake plays through November 24 with performances on Fri., Sat., and Mon. at 8 p.m., and Sun. at 2 p.m. (dark Nov. 8-11). Pay-What-You-Want seating is available every Mon. night in addition to regular seating, subject to availability. The Fountain Theatre is located at 5060 Fountain Ave. (at Normandie) in Los Angeles 90029. Patrons are invited upstairs to relax before and after the show at the Fountain’s café. For reservations and information, call (323) 663–1525 or go to the Fountain website.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Eric A. Gordon

Eric A. Gordon, People’s World Cultural Editor, wrote a biography of radical American composer Marc Blitzstein and co-authored composer Earl Robinson’s autobiography. He has received numerous awards for his People's World writing from the International Labor Communications Association. He has translated all nine books of fiction by Manuel Tiago (pseudonym for Álvaro Cunhal) from Portuguese, available from International Publishers NY.