*** Punch

A tale of penance and rebirth, somewhat preachily reconstructed

Will Harrison as Jacob in Punch. Photo: Matthew Murphy

Who would argue the value of attempting to make amends after an egregious breach of our collective social contract?

James Graham’s script, based on Jacob Dunne’s 2022 memoir Right from Wrong: My Story of Guilt and Redemption, stems from a pivotal incident in 2011. Dunne, then 19, was out carousing with his mates – just a typical night for the adrenalized gangs known to roam Nottingham’s “estate” neighborhoods — when he came upon a bar fight in progress. Leaping in, he threw a punch that knocked James Hodgkinson out cold. The 28-year-old paramedic-in-training was just a bystander having a drink with his father. He never regained consciousness. After nine days, his parents made the excruciating decision to take him off life support.

Will Harrison starts out as the younger Dunne, brash and itching for a fight. Director Adam Penford has the rowdies lurching toward the audience from above and beneath a nondescript overpass that’s the extent of Anna Fleischle’s stage design. Movement director Leanne Pinder gets the gang aggressively advancing in choreographed vectors, so stagily as to defy any sense of realism or spontaneity. It’s a rumble, West Side Story-style.

In act two, when Dunne, the penitent survivor, emerges from a brief jail term (the killing was classified as manslaughter, rather than murder), Harrison’s physical transformation is striking. Where initially he bristled with free-floating aggression and just the sheer exuberance of youth, he’s now shaken – hesitant, somber, self-questioning. A chaplain (Camila Canó-Flaviá, a bit too officious in this and a subsequent role) offers a path to atonement: “restorative justice,” a movement then in its early days. Lucy Taylor also shoulders two guises: initially that of Jacob’s overwhelmed mother, then a sympathetic parole officer with a sense of irony. Given more emotional latitude, Taylor makes optimal use of it.

The path to restorative justice can take various forms. In this case, it brought Dunne face to face, by carefully calibrated degrees, with the parents – played effectively if not excitingly by Victoria Clark and Sam Robards – whom he’d deprived of a beloved only son.

Watching Harrison shoulder Dunne’s enormous remorse is indeed harrowing, even if the scene and its repercussions are tied up a bit too neatly. The overall effect, regrettably, edges into the genus “afterschool special.” Young audiences might well benefit from absorbing this play’s message of penitence, patience, and reclamation — not to mention the hazards of randomly flying off the handle.

Details: Punch. To November 2.