Broadway Reviews Theatre Review by Howard Miller - September 29, 2025 Punch by James Graham. Based on the book "Right From Wrong" by Jacob Dunne Directed by Adam Penford. Scenic and costume design by Anna Fleischle. Lighting design by Robbie Butler. Original music and sound design by Alexandra Faye Braithwaite Movement director Leanne Pinder. Dialect coaches Charlotte Fleck and Ben Furey.
A thrilling central performance by Will Harrison, a young actor making his Broadway debut, is reason enough to catch this production, which is based on a memoir titled "Right From Wrong," written by Jacob Dunne, the character Harrison portrays. The central incident that gives the play its title unfolds early in Act I in a rough-and-tumble neighborhood in Nottingham, England in 2011. After a night of hard drinking and drugs, 19-year-old Jacob and his hooligan mates are itching for a fight. Without provocation or warning, Jacob blindly throws a punch at a stranger. The victim, James, is knocked to the ground and never recovers. Most of the first act deals with the events leading up to the assault, which we follow largely through Jacob's first-person narration that advances like a fast-paced police procedural. If you are a follower of one of the many popular BBC crime dramas, you'll recognize the style, although in this case the offender is identified early on. Jacob pleads guilty to manslaughter and is sentenced to a 30-month prison term. Along the way, we also learn something of his back story and meet his mother (Lucy Taylor, excellent in a too-truncated role) and, most significantly, James' parents, David (Sam Robards) and Joan (Victoria Clark).
After the fiery first act, the second half of the play switches gears to take us on the long road to restorative justice, focusing on the painful process of forging a connection between Jacob and James' folks with the support of a caseworker, Nicola (Camila Canó-Flaviá). Nicola makes it clear that most of the work in this field focuses on lesser crimes, involving financial and personal responsibility. Victims and perpetrators often do not meet or make any contact with one another. It's more of an extension of the kind of victim statement that would come in the sentencing phase of a trial. In this case, however, there has been no trial, which has left James' parents with far too many unanswered questions. By the time Nicola contacts them, they are ready to address their questions to Jacob, the only person who can be of use. The rest of the play deals with the slow process of reconciliation that picks at scabs which will never fully heal. You are bound to wonder how you might react in Joan and David's shoes, and, indeed, each is dealing with the loss of their son in their own way. Punch offers up no easy answers and emphasizes that the way things turn out in this instance says nothing about the outcome in other cases. The willingness to try is what counts. Any play that attempts to dramatize a non-fiction book-length account is bound to overemphasize some points and skim past others, and that is the case with Punch. I would have wanted to know more about Jacob's family (a brother pops up in order to make a plot point, and then disappears) and about Jacob's victim, James. But the emphasis here is on the consequences and the effort to mitigate as much as possible the damage caused to James' parents. To that end, Punch packs a wallop.
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