David Nellist’s Protest Song wins star-studded support in New York
The North East actor’s New York stage debut has attracted starry audiences and old friends alike - and he’s hoping his native Newcastle will be the play’s next home
David Nellist is feeling the bite of a New York winter. “It’s so cold,” he says, laughing at how the wind can suddenly whip down a street with enough force to halt your stride.
But even the sharpest gust can’t dull the fact that he’s having a pretty special time.
The much-loved and accomplished Newcastle actor is there with a new run of Protest Song, Tim Price’s fierce, funny and deeply humane one-man play inspired by a homeless man swept into the Occupy London movement of 2011/12.
Part of the wider global Occupy protest - which originated on Wall Street - the movement challenged economic inequality and corporate influence following the financial crisis. In the UK, protesters set up a large encampment outside St Paul’s Cathedral, creating a visible, makeshift community that sparked national debate - and provided a setting for Price’s play, which premiered at London’s National Theatre.
Bringing the play to New York audiences throughout December, David has been making his his way to La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, the legendary downtown theatre that once nurtured Sam Shepard and decades of political performance work.
When he first visited last year, David immediately recognised something in its bones. “It has a similar sort of feel and a history to Live Theatre,” he says, speaking of the Newcastle theatre where he has performed so many times - in productions like Wet House, Love It If We Beat Them and Smack Family Robinson.
“Bare brick, intimate, a place shaped by stories that punch upwards. I felt at home there.”
And now he’s part of its 60-year history.
David first saw Protest Song during its original 2013 run at the National, starring Rhys Ifans, and the impact was instant. “I saw it on press night because I was mates with Tim,” he recalls. “I said to him afterwards, ‘I’d love to do that play one day’.”
The seeds of realising that ambition came during lockdown. Like so many actors, David found himself wondering what theatre might look like when it was allowed to return.
“I started thinking maybe one-person plays are going to be the thing to do,” he remembers. “I sent the script to director Sarah Bedi who I’d worked with at the Globe and she loved it,” he says. It was the start of a two-year journey to staging the show at London’s Arcola in 2023 - a production he not only performed in, but helped will into being.
For someone who’d always seen himself as “just an actor for hire,” the process of putting something on as well as performing in it was daunting. “I’d never done that before,” he says. “I’d never had to sort out the venue, get the producer.”
But one supporter made things a lot easier: Lou Mirabal, a former Navy Lieutenant Commander - also the husband of Tony, Emmy and Grammy-award winning lyricist and composer, Marc Shaiman (Hairspray, Sleepless in Seattle, Mary Poppins Returns) and David’s “sort of angel philanthropist”.
“We first met when Lou was in the UK while Marc was working on Mary Poppins Returns and he would come to the theatre quite a lot,” says David. “He saw me in Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and recognised me from Sherlock. He wrote to me and I wrote back.
“About four years later, I was raising money in my dad’s name after he’d passed away and I got this donation for £1,000 from Lou. He had lost his dad around the same time as me. We started chatting and then he came over to see me in I, Daniel Blake.”
Lou donated several thousand pounds to the London run of Protest Song “out of pure kindness and his want for me to do the play,” David says - before later offering an even bigger gift.
After the Arcola run, Lou asked him what he wanted to do next. David, told him he’d always dreamed of performing in New York. Lou simply replied, ‘OK. We know people. We can probably make that happen’.
“And he bloody did,” laughs David.
So here he is - living out a “bucket-list dream” and New York has embraced him back.
As well as friends from home who have travelled out to see him on stage, audiences have also included stars he has watched for years, none more thrilling than his West Wing hero, Allison Janney.
“She was so lovely, so kind and generous. It was a real honour to talk to her actor to actor,” he says, clearly as giddy as any West Wing devotee (hello!) would be.
And there were more surreal evenings to come before the end of the run.
Bette Midler and Nathan Lane turned up last night (December 18) to see the play.
“I mean that kind of thing is never not going to be bizarre,” he laughs.
Despite the glamour in the audience, on stage David says performing Protest Song remains an intense and lonely experience.
Inspired by real events, the play examines what happens when a person who has nowhere else to go encounters and group of people who are choosing to occupy the streets in protest.
This is David’s third one-man play - he jokes he seems to do “one a decade” - and the challenge never gets easier.
“The torture, the absolute torture, to learn every single time,” he says. “There’s always a point in rehearsal when I feel sure I’ll have to tell the director I can’t do it. The fear isn’t performing; it’s drying.
“Five minutes before, I would probably pay you not to have to go on,” he admits. But the moment he steps onstage, something releases. “There’s a nice freedom you get, but you pay for that with not having anyone to rescue you!”
The emotional toll can be heavy too. Performing Protest Song while touring I, Daniel Blake in 2023 pushed him harder than he realised at the time. “By the end, I ended up in therapy because I’d gone a bit deep,” he says.
So much of what he carried onto the Daniel Blake stage was personal: his father had recently passed away, and he used his dad’s tool bag in the show. A close friend had cancer, and he used her photograph to represent Daniel’s late wife. His friends gently intervened.
“They said, ‘I think you just need to try acting a little bit’,” David smiles.
In a theatrical twist of fate, his next confirmed project is a return to Daniel Blake for a UK tour in the spring. Co-produced by Northern Stage in Newcastle, the acclaimed production, adapted from Ken Loach’s film by its leading man Davey Johns, is coming to the venue from March 20 to April 4.
“No one else is playing that part,” he says firmly. “I don’t care what I’m doing. I love Daniel Blake… but this time there’s a couple of months between the shows, so that will be easier.”
Before each performance of Protest Song, David begins in the audience, shaking a cup and asking for spare change. “Some people are fooled,” he says - but every dollar collected goes directly to the Manhattan Food Bank.
“There are so many correlations between this and Daniel Blake,” he continues. “Both characters are men pushed to the margins, clinging to dignity. The theme is, I guess, connection all the way through.”
This weekend, when Protest Run ends on December 21, David will turn his attention to something equally special: Christmas in New York with his family.
“My kids are coming out with my wife,” he says, delighted. “We’ll be here until the 27th.”
It offers something to look forward to in what has been a heartbreaking week for Lou and his husband, who were close friends of filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle.
Their sudden deaths have cast a shadow over the household, and David feels their grief deeply. “It’s awful, awful stuff,” he says. “Unimaginable - and compounded by the fact it feels like you’re in the middle of a news story on top of the shock and grief.”
While the run New York of Protest Song is nearly over, this is not the end of its journey with David.
“The one thing I haven’t done and really want to do is perform it in Newcastle,” he says. “I’m desperate to do it at home and am really trying to do that - hopefully there might be news of that in the new year.”
I get the sense that performing the play at home - where the people, politics and heart of it feel closest for him - would feel like completing the circle.