In 2011, 19-year-old Jacob Dunne, already involved with street gangs and drug dealing, pitched into a fight a friend was involved in. He threw just a single punch but its recipient, James Hodgkinson, fell, striking his head. He died after nine days ln a coma. Dunne was found guilty of manslaughter and given a 30-month sentence.
On release, Dunne could have been lost to his old life if Hodgkinson’s parents had not asked to meet him. Their action transformed his future. Donne wrote a book about it, about life both before and after that fatal punch, and James Graham’s play is based upon it. When it premièred last year at Nottingham Playhouse, which commissioned it, Punch was warmly received by the critics, our own Steve Orme included. I agree; it is a play with a powerful impact given a vibrant production by director Adam Penford.
Punch starts as a monologue, delivered directly to the audience, which is then anachronistically intercut with scenes ranging from post-prison therapy sessions to early teenage involvement with gang culture before becoming more chronological after the interval as it explores the development of a relationship between killer Jacob and the parents of James, his paramedic victim.
We are given a context, broadly sketched in but very relevant, of a modern estate idealistically planned to continue and foster the community of those who were moved that did the opposite, of a divided society of them and of us either side of a bridge. It is a picture of young men whose lives were banal and going nowhere who generated their own excitement by fighting, while Penford’s production generates its own excitement with its physicality and stylised movement directed by Leanne Pinder.
The sloping arc of Anna Fleischle’s setting matches the openness and sharing of the production, but its underpass and barriers a reminder of dangers and providing a downstage focus from which David Shields’s Jacob can strongly connect with the audience and where he delivers the punch in a moment several times returned to that plunges to blackout before it makes impact.
Shields gives a dynamic performance as Jacob, seemingly always present, in the background if not centre stage. As narrative turns to re-enactment, he seems never still, tensed up and explosive yet somehow suggesting a residual innocence. He has a traditional idea of virility, fights with his fists refusing a knife or a firearm. Why, he asks, does doing bad things create good feelings?
Both pace and delivery become more measured as Jacob becomes involved with the mediation service. From being unable to face up to his actions, he can now understand the need for both honesty and accountability.
The other members of the cast (Alec Boaden, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Tony Hirst, Shalisha James-Davis and Emma Pallant) play multiple roles. They all become Jacob’s schoolmates and gang members, and they double as family members, police, probation and victim support services. You know who they are without explanation. It isn’t just the slipping into a different shirt that changes Jacob’s probation officer into his mother; it is the actor. Here is a single-parent mum who doesn’t understand how her good little boy turned into a truant and bad lad, who was never told about dyslexia or attention disorder, who finds herself no longer able to work as a child minder.
It is when Hodgkinson’s parents, wanting answers to why they lost their son, contact a mediation service that Punch draws us in, engaging our empathy. Hesmondhaigh and Hirst play Joan and David with absolute honesty as they find themselves gaining understanding if not quite finding the ability to forgive. Their contact sparks a transformation in Jacob’s life that is reflected in Shields’s performance, though these scenes move on too quickly to give an accurate picture of what happened. We need the reminder that Graham gives us that the process from leaving prison on New Year’s Eve to their meeting and then on to Jacob’s role as a mentor to young people took not months but years.