Punch at the Young Vic: A powerful look at restorative justice
Punch | The Young Vic | ★★★★☆
Jacob was “itching for some fucking action”. So begins this dramatisation of the true story of Jacob Dunne, who killed 28-year-old paramedic James Hodgkinson in an unprovoked attack on a drunken New Year’s Eve with one fatal blow. Jacob did not mean to kill James, but in the play, per his request, the event is not described as an accident: “You can’t accidentally throw a punch. It wasn’t an accident – and I have to live with that forever, even if I had no intention to cause the harm I did,” Dunne said in an interview.
Attempting to create something meaningful, or perhaps redemptive, from his shame has come to define the rest of his life following a restorative justice programme in which he met James’s parents Joan Scourfield and David Hodgkinson face to face, and stared the consequences of his action in the eye. In this way, Punch is a show that explores what drama’s social function can be. Dunne himself says he can’t bear to watch the second act. More than just the prison time he served, this play reckons with the fundamental stakes of justice and, ultimately, the question of whether he can be redeemed.
Written by James Graham, who was commissioned by the Nottingham Playhouse where Punch premiered last May, the play is in safe hands. Graham’s dialogue effectively balances sincerity and irreverence to create believable human characters.
David Shields is jittery and propulsive as Jacob, darting around the stage as he weaves between narrator and protagonist. A concrete and metal double stairway forms a brutalist backdrop, with most of the action taking place in the Meadows, an estate in Nottingham infamous for drugs and violence where Jacob grew up. With no set changes, the lighting is a key player, with flashes and blackouts taking the audience from scene to scene in a way that mirrors the threading together of memory. This is fitting: one of the questions Jacob reckons with in the play is how to know if you’re remembering well.
Shields’ performance is commanding, often directly holding the gaze of audience members, while Julie Hesmondhalgh plays second star as Joan, the mother of the victim. Located in the space between acting and social justice, the Coronation Street veteran is in more than comfortable territory.
Presenting restorative justice in a way that values realism over dramatic effect was crucial for Dunne when advising on the play, with him at pains to emphasise to Graham how restorative justice is designed to have no unknowns. Every possible scenario of a meeting is considered and planned in advance, from how the parties will greet each other to what questions will be asked, and it was important for Dunne that the play was faithful in showing this. But Punch does not need cheap thrills. Most of the context is taken care of within the first few scenes, meaning the play instead has time to reckon with the far more interesting questions of how do we make sense of the senseless.
The power of the play is at times weakened by an impulse to explain. Emotional highpoints are climbed down from with the more clinical care-speak of the mediation professionals and probation officers who punctuate the social system. Lines about the success rate of restorative justice or the politics of architecture feel a little clunky among the otherwise deft dialogue, while the ending veers on the sweet.
But this play is transparent in how it aspires to a social function. At Jacob’s meeting with Joan and David, Joan lays out her condition that she needs good to come of this. Part of this is asking Jacob if he will collaborate in doing publicity work on one-punch deaths. Punch is one of the products of that; it wants to educate and that’s no bad thing. Its legacy, having already been cited in a court case and in parliament, shows it has already succeeded. At curtains down when there is an invitation to stay in the auditorium for an extra 10 minutes for reflection, I’d recommend taking it. This is a play where the impact only grows.
• Punch is out now at the Young Vic – for more information click here