Punch
IT was announced today that James Graham’s play Punch will open on Broadway this fall as part of the Manhattan Theatre Club’s 2025-2026 season.
Graham’s best work since Ink explores local politics—the point where most people engage with the state, confront its failures, and sometimes glimpse its potential.
He is known for taking on big institutions—football, newspapers, politics—unpacking the contradictions, anxieties, and aspirations that bind or divide us.
But Punch, which transfers to the Young Vic after a run at Nottingham Playhouse, is different. Deeply personal in both subject and emotional impact, it rarely loses sight of the bigger picture.
Restorative justice, a process that brings perpetrators and victims together, forms the core of Punch, based on Jacob Dunne’s memoir Right from Wrong.
On a hot July night in 2011, 19-year-old Jacob Dunne, a swaggering Nottingham teenager, throws a single punch at James Hodgkinson, a 28-year-old paramedic he’s never met. Nine days later, Hodgkinson dies. Dunne is jailed for manslaughter.
The play centres around Dunne’s descent into homelessness, his slow rehabilitation, and his extraordinary meeting with James’s parents, Joan and David.
In dramatic terms, Punch explores guilt, grief, and transformation, intertwined with class, masculinity, and systemic failures.
Graham neither absolves Dunne nor portrays him as a monster. Instead, he invites the audience to confront the circumstances that shaped him while acknowledging the life he took.
The writing is sharp, humane, and often humorous.
Adam Penford’s direction allows the story to build gradually. Anna Fleischle’s sparse set, a two-tiered concrete underpass, evokes Dunne’s isolation.
Robbie Butler’s lighting design guides the audience through the emotional journey.
David Shields’s portrayal of Jacob shifts from brashness to uncertainty. Hesmondhalgh and Hirst deliver quiet devastation to Joan and David Hodgkinson, conveying pain through silence.
The play builds to a shattering meeting. Audiences responded with tears.
Punch isn’t just about justice or redemption. It’s about the radical possibility of grace.
Critic Clive Davis reckons Punch should tour schools – I agree. This is a play of fierce, simple dignity. It is honest, empowering, and deeply moving.
