Jacob Dunne is 19 and jumping out of his skin, with no prospects beyond the instant gratifications of booze, drugs and violence. He and his friends particularly love what they refer to as “drama.” For Jacob, “doing bad things … creates good feelings,” and the best time to get that release, he says, is when there’s nothing left to do at the end of a night of partying with your buddies. “That’s when you want the … ‘drama.’”
But it’s tragedy that Jacob finds.
One evening he throws a punch that lands another man, James, in the hospital. Nine days later, James is dead. Jacob is sentenced to 30 months in prison for manslaughter — the relative leniency is partly due to the fact that James wasn’t killed by the punch itself but by hitting his head on the pavement when he collapsed.
Before we get to that lethal blow, James Graham’s play “Punch” has set the stage with a series of kinetic scenes that, under Adam Penford’s direction, feel like so many pugilistic quick hits. Jacob (a fine Will Harrison, who portrayed the lead guitarist in “Daisy Jones & the Six”) gives us a tour of his life in a Nottingham housing estate, where he was raised in equal parts by an overwhelmed mother (Lucy Taylor) and a group of male friends and neighbors all too willing to enable his most impulsive penchants.
But “Punch,” which opened Monday night in a Manhattan Theater Club production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, is not just interested in Jacob’s experience in the British projects-to-prison pipeline — nominally, at least. The emotional and moral center of the show is the concept of restorative justice, which connects the victims of a crime with its perpetrators in an attempt to encourage accountability and responsibility on one side, and help with the healing process on the other.
And this is how we come to know James’s parents, David (Sam Robards) and Joan (Victoria Clark, who won her second Tony Award for “Kimberly Akimbo” in 2023). The loss of their son has left them dazed, but also wanting answers to his senseless death.
Central to restorative justice is that it’s a two-way street, but in “Punch” the traffic flows mostly in Jacob’s direction. This is largely because the play is based on Dunne’s memoir “Right From Wrong,” which he wrote after being released from prison: He is the show’s protagonist and for the most part we see the events through him — he is onstage most of the time, narrating the action and letting us in on his thoughts.
James’s parents don’t fare nearly as well because Graham’s script tends to take shortcuts wherever they are concerned. David and James were on a pub crawl after a cricket game when the altercation happened, but despite his being a witness, the father’s experience of that night and its aftermath feels only perfunctory in the show. “Like the whole system is built around them, ‘him’, not us, victims,” David complains at one point. So is the play — it takes until the very end for us to learn anything about James’s personality, as if he had been reduced to a plot device.
When David tells Nicola (Camila Canó-Flaviá), who works at the restorative justice organization Remedi, that family members and friends don’t understand why the couple would want to be in contact with Jacob, the play just moves along, even though digging into those contrary arguments would have enriched it.
And while we get regular updates on Jacob’s life, including his ongoing connection with a young woman named Clare (Canó-Flaviá again), we’re simply told that it takes David and Joan two years to finally meet the man who killed their son — another bypass that adds to the imbalance in perspectives. The complex psychological back-and-forth involved in restorative justice is rendered in a much richer way in the 2023 French feature “All Your Faces,” although that covers various cases, thus allowing a wider breadth of experiences than “Punch,” which centers on one story.
Some of Graham’s other plays also involve confrontations between distinct worldviews and philosophies. You could see that dynamic unfurl in his play “Ink,” which described Rupert Murdoch’s reinvention of the broadsheet The Sun and was on Broadway in 2019, or in “Best of Enemies,” which revisited the 1968 debates between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal and was at London’s Young Vic in 2021. (We’ll merely acknowledge Graham’s books for musicals, an act of mercy that anybody who gritted their teeth through “Finding Neverland” or “Tammy Faye” will appreciate.)
“Punch” comes up short in capturing the exchange between the victim’s family and the perpetrator because it always leans on Jacob’s perspective, down to an ending that shows him happily moving on in his life as if James’s death had been a positive in terms of his personal life’s arc. But are we meant to think that meeting Jacob was enough to give Joan and David closure?
In an article in The New York Times, the real life parents of James, David Hodgkinson and Joan Scourfield, talked of now being on “warm, collaborative terms” with Jacob, but also of the emotional toll involved in both losing their son and engaging in the restorative justice process. They are in the show, but also missing from it.
The play — which can also be seen in London right now, having just transferred to the West End after premiering at the Nottingham Playhouse last year — is much more effective in another area, and that is the way in which certain working-class milieus foster an idea of masculinity that is destructive for everybody.
If the initial scenes, when Jacob introduces us to his world, feel like a performative acting showcase, it’s because they are: Jacob is projecting flippant toughness for the benefit of his mates. But he is imprisoned by his circumstances (at one point Anna Fleischle’s bi-level set combines with Robbie Butler’s lighting design to make the projects’ lit-up windows look a bit like tiny little cages).
Later, when the prison chaplain asks if he wants to pray, Jacob gives a quick glance to make sure nobody’s watching before he gets down on his knees — he knows a moment of opening up to vulnerability would be interpreted by other inmates as weakness. When he’s released, the neighborhood hoodlums call him “one-punch man” and Muhammad Ali in praise. He’s made it! And yet he feels like a wretch.
But once again, what of David and Joan? Restorative justice brings together potentially conflicting issues of forgiveness, grief and fortitude. But with just one side of the story, it’s hard to grasp how unbelievably hard it is to pull off.
Punch
Through Nov. 2 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
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