#fiction #theatre #bureaucracy #austerity

Warning: Contains spoilers

A statement commonly misattributed to Joseph Stalin holds that the death of one man is a tragedy, but the death of millions is only a statistic. Its perseverance attests to its fundamental truth. Not only do our minds glance off human misery on a massive scale, but our media culture routinely elevates individual tragedies over mass suffering in the service of ‘human interest’. Catastrophes require avatars to be relatable, and individual victims such as Alan Kurdi, Renée Good or Anne Frank will come to stand in for all those who shared their fate.

And where real life does not readily yield relatable faces for a tragedy, art may create them. I, Daniel Blake stands in this tradition, of social realism which centres the misery inflicted on the working class. The movie, and now stage show, is the j’accuse of veteran filmmaker Ken Loach, and a testament to the thousands of Britons who were socially murdered as a result of austerity. Silent victims whose deaths resulted from the impersonal technocratic machinery of the state and the invisible hand of the market. The movie premiered in 2016 when the UK had been in the vice of austerity for eight years. Now, over ten years later, Daniel Blake has come to the stage to tell his story once again.