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A new James Graham drama on stage or screen always causes a stir. But his new play Punch arrives at the Young Vic in March not only trailing rave reviews from its Nottingham premiere but with the rare distinction of having been cited in a court case and in Parliament.
Punch is based on Right From Wrong, Jacob Dunne’s memoir of unintentionally killing trainee paramedic James Hodgkinson with a single, random blow on an intoxicated night out in Nottingham in 2011. After serving 14 months for manslaughter Dunne underwent a process of restorative justice with Hodgkinson’s parents Joan and David, took a degree in criminology, and engaged in an ongoing programme of education and community work.
The Guardian called the play “propulsive and at times poetic” when it opened in Nottingham last May. That month Judge Shaun Smith KC said in his summing up of a GBH case that “people need to watch” the drama to understand the risk of violence. Labour MP Lilian Greenwood told the House of Commons that Punch “raises important questions about young men and their offending behaviour and shines a light on the potential power of restorative justice".
Graham’s drama therefore joins the select group of stage works that cut through beyond their immediate audience to the realms of government and the judiciary. These include Nicolas Kent and Richard Norton-Taylor’s Half the Picture, a dramatization of the Scott Arms to Iraq inquiry, which became the first new play ever performed in the Houses of Parliament. Meanwhile a judge wrote to Susie Miller after seeing her monologue Prima Facie, featuring Jodie Comer as a lawyer who is raped, to say that she had rewritten the direction that judges give to juries in rape cases, including lines from the script.
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“I don't think theatre necessarily ‘should' be a force for social change, but I believe that it 'could' be,” Graham tells me. “Punch in Nottingham attracted judges, metro mayors, MPs, case workers, charity workers... it felt like a real civic piece of engagement, out of which – hopefully – comes conversations.”
As in his state of the nation dramas like Sherwood, This House, Dear England and the recent Brian and Maggie, Graham again uses an individual story to examine systems. “Jacob goes through most of the systems in our society: school, the police, the courts, job centres, prison, probation, youth work, social work,” he says. “What's refreshing and exhilarating for me, as a writer lucky enough to talk about big picture 'national' themes, is that this is politics on a local level – the place most people interface with the state and experience all of its shortcomings, and – occasionally – its potential.”
The stage version was the brainchild of Nottingham Playhouse’s artistic director Adam Penford, who read Dunne’s memoir, contacted him on social media, and suggested Graham (who was born in nearby Mansfield) as adapter. “There was a bit of hesitancy because you can never have full autonomy over your own story and you have to be mindful of the other people connected to it, like David and Joan,” says Dunne.
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Growing up with his mum and younger brother on a crime-ridden council estate where he started dealing weed as a teenager, Dunne had little experience of theatre apart from “panto as a kid”. He also wasn’t aware how eminent Graham – who was writing Sherwood, also set in Nottingham, for BBC1 at the time – was in the field.
“But I quickly came round to appreciate how powerful theatre is,” Dunne says. “When done right it’s the best place to share stories, far beyond TV or the written word.” The fact that the play was mentioned in court and Parliament (a second MP, Lib Dem Paul Kohler, recently tabled a question about restorative justice) shows how conversations have rippled out from those who have seen the show, he says.
Dunne is played on stage by David Shields, while Joan Hodgkinson is played by Julie Hesmondhalgh, who has a track record in projects dealing with weighty subjects, from the right to die storyline of her pioneering trans character Hayley Cropper in Coronation Street, to playing a rape victim in Broadchurch. She also has past form on playing real people, including the mother of murdered Sophie Lancaster in the TV film Black Roses and the wife of Toby Jones’s title character in Mr Bates vs the Post Office.
“My healthy place is in the middle of the Venn diagram between social justice and acting,” says Hesmondhalgh, who is also a Labour activist and patron of several charities. “These roles come to me partly because I’m good for the chat: I can talk around these subjects, because I'm genuinely, really interested and passionate about them.”
There is a responsibility in playing real people, she adds, and it was important for her, Dunne and Graham that the Hodgkinsons were comfortable with the play.
“We met Joan and David mid-rehearsals on Zoom, which you know, is never great,” she says. “And then they came to a run through later on, which was just one of the oddest things any of us have ever done. We’re acting out the worst possible moments of their life, like turning off James's life support, while they're sitting about six feet away in a brightly lit room. It was really horrible, and it really made me question what we were doing. Who am I, to be play acting this trauma, when they're actually going through it? But being the incredibly generous and courageous people that they are, they really embraced it.”
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Audiences in Nottingham were gripped. “You could feel the need in people to stay and talk about it,” Hesmondhalgh says, “because it asked really big questions of an audience about whether you would be able to do what Joan and David did, to engage in restorative justice and sit across the table from the person who's killed your child”. Graham explains why the story works so powerfully on stage. “It's about space, both in the sense of time, and proximity,” he says. “You have the time over a couple of hours to really dig in and understand a character's dilemma - which creates empathy. And the physical proximity to the work and other audience members creates a natural sense of community. Which is essentially what Punch is about.”
He believes it will have the same impact in London. “It's a golden rule of storytelling that the more specific you make your world, the more universal it is,” he says. “If you've done your job, the themes of the piece should carry and relate to any audience, anywhere. Most stories set in the criminal justice system have a tendency – understandably – to be pretty bleak and without offering a hopeful way forward at the end. Jacob, David and Joan's story, while full of very relatable pain, presents this rare case of the chance for some positive outcomes from tragedy.”
Dunne, I sense, is torn between wanting to put the killing of James Hodgkinson behind him and continuing to use the story to open minds on everything from youth violence to housing to education.
He created a podcast about his experiences before writing the book, and has now made a second podcast, also called Right From Wrong, about the process of adapting it for the stage. “Will I ever lose faith in trying to prevent this from happening to other people? No,” he says. Having caused another man’s death is “something I live with every day. That's the life sentence, really. Once you fully take accountability and hear the harm you caused, you do everything you can to repair that harm, although you never will. That’s my ongoing journey.”
Punch is at the Young Vic from 1 March-26 April, youngvic.org.
