Theatre reviews: Un-Expecting | I, Daniel Blake

I, Daniel Blake, Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow ★★★★

Life, said John Lennon, is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans; and here – in Glasgow this week – are two moving, funny, tragic and deeply humane plays about human beings facing up to their powerlessness in the face of fate, and then trying to find their own ways forward.

In Nathan Scott-Dunn’s Un-Expecting – this week’s new Play, Pie and Pint lunchtime drama at Oran Mor – Jess and Scott are two bright young things whose lives take a devastatingly unexpected turn when Jess discovers she is pregnant, after a night on the town in Edinburgh, and a brief one-night stand. Scott is at music school in London, Jess is about to start university in Edinburgh; but when Jess decides to keep the baby, her plans and ambitions go on indefinite hold, while Scott discovers that being the good future dad he wants to be – and which has own father never was – is difficult when you’re 400 miles away.

Scott-Dunn handles all this in a fast-moving text that often uses ballad-style rhyme to move us through the story, as it alternates between monologues from both characters, and intense dialogue scenes. Scott is desperate to finish his degree and earn a living, Jess struggles with the fact that knowing you chose motherhood doesn’t necessarily make the physical and emotional journey any easier, once reality bites; and in Eduardo Berto’s elegantly simple production, Cindy Awor as Jess, and Cristian Ortega as Scott, fairly sparkle with youthful energy and feeling, as they wrestle with the business of becoming “adequate” parents, almost by accident.

It’s the quality of the writing, though – rooted in Scott-Dunn’s own recent experience of becoming a father – that supports the open-hearted warmth and strength of their performances; in a fine Play, Pie And Pint show that has no further dates planned at the moment, but that – like Scott and Jess’s little one – certainly deserves a long and happy future life.

If an unplanned pregnancy can sometimes become a happy accident, there’s no such potential upside to the hammer-blows suffered by Daniel Blake, the working-class hero of Ken Loach’s award-winning 2016 film I, Daniel Blake, adapted by the film’s leading actor Dave Johns into a 2023 Northern Stage theatre version that tours briefly to the Citizens’ this week.

Set in Newcastle, the play follows the struggles of 50-something widower Daniel Blake as he struggles to recover from a severe heart attack, while falling foul of a draconian benefits system that refuses to class him as sick or disabled. Forced to apply for universal credit as a job-seeker, he finds himself at the job centre when single mum Katie, just decanted from London with her teenage daughter Daisy, is about to be “sanctioned” – ie deprived of all benefits for four weeks – for arriving late for her appointment; he tries to defend her, and the two strike up an unlikely friendship, as he becomes a kind of surrogate dad to Katie, and grandad to Daisy.

And in a sense, that’s about it, so far as their story goes. Katie comes close to starvation before taking up work as an “escort”, Daniel never escapes the double bind of a system that will not meet his basic need for rest and recuperation.

The story, though – retold here by a fine cast, led by a poignantly brilliant Dave Nellist as Daniel – is full of a depth of touching detail that speaks volumes about the texture of life in post-industrial working-class Britain today. And meanwhile, a backdrop of “tough” ministerial speeches about the benefits system speaks volumes about the growing disconnection between our professional political class, and those who most need not only their help; but their empathy, their respect for claimants as fellow citizens, and their leadership in reforming a benefits system whose cruel and conspicuous lack of those qualities still shames the UK, every day.

Un-Expecting at Oran Mor, Glasgow, and I Daniel Blake at the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, both until tomorrow