Review: PUNCH by James Graham, Apollo Theatre

It’s a surprise to read that Punch is not even 18 months old. Since its premiere in Nottingham in May last year, the true life story (it is based on Jacob Dunne's memoir, Right From Wrong) has played the Young Vic, opened on Broadway and now in the West End - to say nothing of citings in Parliament and beyond.

I suggest that swift embedding in the national consciousness is not just because it’s by the most successful playwright of his generation and one of very few with genuine name-recognition, James Graham, but because it also taps into the zeitgeist, telling people something substantive about their hearts and minds. That said, so does the miserable rhetoric of Reform, so we’ve no guarantees when the curtain rises.

The first half proves, on those high expectations, something of a disappointment. We meet our protagonist, Jacob, on a set that has echoes of A Clockwork Orange’s infamous underpass, the brutalist obsession of 1960s town planners brutalising its youth, idealism butting up against the nihilism of post-industrialism with only one winner. Quite a lot of exposition, much of it delivered directly across the fourth wall as monologue, follows, which, if you’ve seen Shane Meadows’ This Is England or, less likely I suppose at the Apollo Theatre, grown up in or around an inner-city sink estate, you’ll know anyway.

David Shields, with an authentically lean, hollow face that catches the essential sadness that clings to lads like Jacob, is very good in recounting his early life. While it’s a case study almost too calibrated with a list of 21st century social problems (broken home, ADHD needs undiagnosed in school, low level drug dealing, continually seeking the thrill of transgression) it’s brought to life at such pace and with just enough nuance in Shields’ portrayal, that we almost forget that Jacob’s USP, his calling card, is violence. Not the knives and machetes in postcode feuds gone bad, but the old-fashioned dust-ups that used to happen every Saturday outside football grounds.

He whacks James with one Punch and James dies.

It is in the second half that you see how the play has found its way into the national conversation. After prison has given a bright lad the time and distance he needed to think, Jacob sees the slide back to his old life, starts slipping and doesn’t want it. His probation officer, Wendy, played with a sardonic resignation by Emma Pallant who, in a nice theatrical flourish, also plays his alcoholic mother, can see it too, but the system could not promote that gruesome outcome any more if it were actually designed to do so. The fork in the road, the path to redemption, comes from an unlikely source.

James’s parents are also suffering from the system (and it is a system, directed and inter-connected) that is producing inevitably bad outcomes. Denied a trial by Jacob’s guilty plea, there’s been no opportunity to hear what happened, to place their son in his own life and death, no catharsis - even his last moments were held at arm’s length, as the life support was switched off and his soul ebbed away.
 

Julie Hesmondhalgh and Tony Hirst are, to reach for an overused descriptor in Theatre, brave in their sensitive portrayals - they had the actual parents in the room and advising them in rehearsal. But the real bravery comes from the step the real Joan and David took in accepting the process of restorative justice.

Stuck, with only anger at a sentence that was barely longer than that handed out to 2011’s flat-screen-stealing rioters, they asked for an explanation from the only person who could provide it - Jacob himself. There’s a lot of stilted, but painfully honest, answers on paper over a two year period in which it slowly dawns on us that Joan is finding the son she lost and Jacob the parent he needed, before we reach the seismic face-to-face meeting.

Except it isn’t seismic at all. A fundamental principle of restorative justice is that there should be no surprises and Graham’s writing, showing heroic forbearance, gives us none. There’s nothing of the jolt you feel with the thematically similar One Second To The Next, Werner Herzog’s astonishing short film made for AT&T about the dangers of texting while driving. The money shot never comes. 

Graham trusts his director, Adam Penford, and his actors to convey the weight of the encounter through the tiniest of human interactions. A glass of water is spilt (if you’ve seen the Kimberley biscuit scene in The Quiet Girl, you’ll get that same need to gulp); an eye is not held, then held; an almost superhuman empathy is conjured on one side of the room and a heart opens slowly in response. It’s really worth buying a seat close to the stage as this is very intimate stuff, Shields breathtaking in the subtlety of his characterisation.

There’s a denouement that explains what happened next that is necessary I suppose, but many in the audience will be aware of Jacob’s redemptive work in initiatives aimed at avoiding kids like him throwing one, fatal, Punch and of his relationship with Joan. That said, it’s interesting to read that many parents bring their own teens (boys, mainly I’m guessing) to see the play, the astringent authenticity of Jacob a route into bad lads’ psychology hitherto inaccessible to social services.

Punch is an imbalanced play that bears some theatrical flaws around pacing and conventional approaches to exposition and narrative construction - but such quibbles are unfair as I suspect there’s no other way to handle a story so unbelievably believable without the intrusion of sentimentality. It’s a highwire act that just about works, largely thanks to a confident writer, an acutely perceptive director and a brilliant central performance from Shields.

Read our interview with Tony Hirst, who plays David, here

Punch is at the Apollo Theatre until 29 November

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