Broadway play Punch’s excellent, visceral title is also the dark heart of the true story that inspired its making.
In 2011, Jacob Dunne, then 19, killed trainee paramedic James Hodgkinson, 28, with a single punch while out drunk one night in the English city of Nottingham. Dunne served a 14-month prison sentence for James’ manslaughter, but his life turned around when James’ parents, Joan Scourfield and David Hodgkinson, reached out to him via a restorative justice program.
Beyond their grief and anger over their son’s senseless murder, Joan and David wanted some good to come from it, and that good, they determined, was Dunne’s rehabilitation, as well as campaigning for awareness around the danger of the single punch. Ultimately, the parents of the man he killed became Jacob Dunne’s most steadfast supporters as he sought to rebuild his life away from violence.
Today, Jacob and Joan remain close and appear together at events to speak about their experiences, and the play—by two-time Olivier Award-winning playwright James Graham—is adapted from Dunne’s memoir, Right From Wrong. Punch has been a critically acclaimed hit in Britain, and its runs on Broadway (presented by Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, booking to Nov. 2) and in London’s West End are opening at roughly the same time.
The timely play, produced in association with Nottingham Playhouse where it premiered last year, shows what can happen if and when humans embrace their better, rather than most bitter and vengeful selves.
Graham’s plays—like the Rupert Murdoch-themed Ink, which also played on Broadway—are typically drawn from real-life events, and thrum with social commentary. But Punch, rather like Britain’s most famous sporting export, soccer, is a game of two distinct halves both in terms of quality and content. The first act is a rickety and fragmented set of scenes showing Jacob’s (Will Harrison) dissolute, hard-drinking, violent days.
The point perhaps is to emphasize the change we shall see in the second act, but it still plays as a straight glorification of mindless arrogance and violence, as we watch him and his group of friends stalk and swagger around the stage, setting their menacing exploits to a butch, staccato rhyme. Both the settings and direction feel queasily framed and dismally flat.
Jumping around in time, we also meet Joan (two-time Tony Award winner Victoria Clark) and David (Sam Robards). David was with James that night, he watched his son die. We see the desperate efforts of Jacob’s mom (Lucy Taylor) to keep her son, and family, on track. The first act stutters to an ungainly halt, not aided by some odd accent work by its American cast.
Stick around though. The second act coalesces into a powerful piece of theater. Here, the core of the play—the restorative justice program itself, and Jacob finally meeting Joan and David—reveals itself. Fragments of detail hit home. For example, David says he can never imagine shaking Jacob’s hand, because (it goes unsaid, and yet we know exactly what he means) that would mean shaking the hand that killed his son with a single punch.
In a TV movie of the week, the weepily feelgood conclusion would be forgiveness and hugs all round, but while Joan lays out the case why she can and does forgive Jacob, David says he cannot and never will be able to, while also wanting the best for Jacob in his life going forward. Clark and Robards deliver superb performances as they navigate their path from turning off their son’s life support machine, to wanting the justice of a long prison sentence, to insisting that something positive flows from the horror and loss they have endured. A recitation of human organs necessary for life becomes a meaningful incantation passed from Joan to Jacob.
Amid the shattered lives, Graham (as ever) is also very funny: there’s a lovely moment when Joan, struggling to recall the word “punitive” lands on the West Yorkshire town of Pontefract instead. The second act also gives Harrison a seismic emotional earthquake to convey, his face and features crumpled as if he looks like he may be sick or just explode, as recognition of what he has done mingles with being confronted with Joan and David’s kindness, mercy, and decency—the very opposite set of qualities he once exhibited himself when he mindlessly killed their son.
This second, powerful act also has some weaknesses. The play doesn’t properly answer why Jacob did what he did, or have his character really answer that question. It doesn’t sketch Jacob’s path to rehabilitation, or make us see his own understanding of what he has done and what he himself does to rebuild his life. We do not see the depths of Joan and David’s grief, and the exact path they took, or discussions they had, in embracing not just mercy but becoming Jacob’s active champions.
Flawed and also powerful, Punch tells an astonishing story, and is a chastening corrective in this era of terrible human behavior. It doesn’t just ask how we should behave, but how we could behave. The real tragedy is that its display of decency—its proposal that, as part of the human contract, we forgive, understand, heal, and repair—is so rare.
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