Punch at the Young Vic – review

James Graham’s passionately argued and deeply moving play Punch is dedicated to the memory of James Hodgkinson, “who himself dedicated his life to the helping and healing of others”, until, at the age of 28, he was killed in a street fight by a single punch.

Like the book by James’s killer, Jacob Dunne, on which it was based, the piece explains the story behind that senseless and wasteful act of violence and the huge good that sprang from that massive wrong. Commissioned by and first seen at the Nottingham Playhouse before moving to the Young Vic, it is theatre as social commentary and as an empathy machine. It’s not a perfect play, but it is one that every single person should see.

In a series of rapidly intercut scenes, it moves from therapy group to memory as Jacob (played by David Shields) recalls the day when he had been drinking all day, high on drugs, moving from pub to pub. When his mates get into a fight, he doesn’t think; he plunges in. The lights fade to black.

The action is high intensity, rapid, swaggering, with Adam Penford’s direction and Leanne Pinder’s stylised movement creating a restless sensibility as Jacob charges up and down Anna Fleischle’s bleak set with its concrete underpass and runways with metal rails running up to a bridge at the top. Apart from Shields, four actors play all the parts, switching between street gangs, youngsters on the move, social workers, policemen, and so on.

But once that punch is thrown, in stark slow motion, Julie Hesmondhalgh and Tony Hirst step forward to play the roles of James’ devastated parents, blank with incomprehension that their lovely son who had been watching the cricket with his father at Trent Bridge is suddenly lying in a hospital bed, on a life support machine that they must turn off. It is superbly acted.

When Jacob is given a sentence for manslaughter shorter than the ones handed out to rioters, they are furious – and start to seek answers to the senseless act that has destroyed not only their lives but Jacob’s too. As they embark on a process of restorative justice, contacting Jacob and seeking to understand his action, they stop the spiral in his life that is pushing him down. “It will always astound me,” he says. “That the people I harmed the most in the world were the ones who believed and helped me the most in return.”

In part, the effect of the play is a tribute to the real people behind it, to the courage it took from James’s parents to embark on this course, on Jacob’s struggles to turn his life around and become an advocate for – and the saviour of – other young people.

But its force also springs from its immediacy, from the way Graham, with great subtlety and skill, weaves a picture of a society where young people are lost to the systems that are meant to help them, forced to make impossible choices in their lives. Without lecturing, it explains the social context of Jacob’s action. It also points out the dangers of fighting – 60 people have died from a single punch in the past ten years – and the pressures on organisations such as Remedi, which helped James’ parents.