I, Daniel Blake – Northern Stage, Newcastle

Writer: Paul Laverty

Adaptor: Dave Johns

Director: Mark Calvert

Unfortunately, this play is just as moving in 2026 as the film was ten years ago. While the play’s realist performances, tragic structure and canny characterisation all serve to build up its emotional ending, the true power of I, Daniel Blake is in its relevance. Based on socialist director Ken Loach’s film, this production about food banks, benefits and desperate solidarity continues to bring audiences to tears.

Daniel Blake (David Nellist) can’t work. He wants to, but for very understandable medical reasons, has to go through the benefits system instead. This sets off a Kafkaesque chain of events, in which Blake finds it harder and harder to access any means with which to live at all.

Along the way he meets Jessica Johnson’s character, Katie – a struggling mum who’s come up to Newcastle from London and can’t quite get the help she needs either. The two of them, and Katie’s daughter Daisy (Jodie Wild), offer each other humanity in an environment determined to make them forget their own, living out lives shaped by austerity and the current benefits system.

Both Johnson and Nellist play their characters with real warmth, and real pain – often combining those emotions in a single line or monologue. The most notable difference between the play and Loach’s original film is the sheer quantity of humour in the play; Dave Johns’ script adaptation, and Nellist’s charismatic performance, inject much-needed comic relief into dark moments, without ever losing the heart of the characters. In fact, many of the jokes feel like yet another aspect of Daniel Blake’s generosity; he brings not only a bit of handicraft knowledge and a helping hand to Katie and her daughter, but opportunities for them to laugh, and forget about their situation.

But that situation is never out of sight. Rhys Jarman’s set design is, like the characters, highly economical – the set and props are the plastic chairs and crates of a food bank, along with metal shelves. Each scene is thus surrounded by embodied reminders of the stakes; money for food is hard to come by in the world of Daniel and Katie, and when the food bank does finally come into play, its depiction is heartbreaking.

The rest of the cast build out the world of the play; Janine Leigh plays a job centre worker with infuriating accuracy, the character’s cool professionalism standing in stark contrast to Daniel Blake’s openness and honesty. Micky Cochrane shifts between a few different characters, not all of whom land as effectively as others: an angry monologue around the middle of the play is delivered with real rage, with more authenticity of emotion than Cochrane’s later state-of-the-nation speech. Kema Sikazwe reprises his role from the film, as an entrepreneurial young man eager to earn enough to escape the world of zero-hours contracts, and does so with the same warmth and charisma – with the addition of some endearing musical elements.

As in the previous stage production at Northern Stage in 2023, this play opens with a real quote from a government minister, reassuring parliamentarians that the play is, in the end, “a work of fiction”. But as subsequent quotations from other politicians dotted throughout the rest of the play attest, the benefits system plays an all-too-real part in current political debate. The inclusion of various political voices, their words on a screen above the main action, serves to powerfully link the national with the local; and the fact that there are quotes from as recent as 2026 give this revival a contemporary edge.

In a climate of competing slogans – “stop the boats”, “make hope normal again” – politicians could do a lot worse than aiming to “make I, Daniel Blake irrelevant for once.” Until they do, this production will continue to move audiences to tears.

Runs until 4 April 2026