PUNCH: Redemption and Runarounds — Review

James Graham’s play Punch, as directed by Adam Penford, is a very, very British work: it’s sturdily acted, choreo-directed within an inch of its life and shot through with a sense of community only a country with a hearty pub culture and universal healthcare could achieve. It is also, despite the production’s evident desire to land with the force of its title, a surprisingly tender and unpretentious story at odds with its battering ram approach.

It’s something of a throwback to the social issue movies of the post-war period; the ones where a kind stranger walks into their best light, the score swelling with sugar, and tells our hero there’s a way out. That’s what happens in the second act of both Punch and the real Jacob Dunne’s life, on which the play is based. During a rowdy night out in his native Nottingham, the blokey ne’er-do-well taps into his friends’ fight at the exact wrong time, throwing a single punch that kills an innocent passerby.

Dunne’s life turns around when, after a brief stint in prison, the victim’s parents feel they’ve exhausted the futility of their anger and decide to try out this newfangled Restorative Justice thing. A first encounter that begins as nerve-shredding slowly gives way to a mutual understanding and eventually a beautiful friendship. If Joan Crawford were alive, she and a roughed-up Tony Curtis would be hugging off into the sunset.

They’re not, but in their place are Victoria Clark and Will Harrison, along with Sam Robards as the father. All are giving excellent performances and solid East Midland accents, especially Harrison in a physically exhausting role. Were these three not here… Well, the production which just opened in London (Penford’s staging premiered last year at the Nottingham Playhouse, before concurrent Broadway and West End transfers) received rave reviews, so it’s hard to say.

Which is not to imply that the rest of the ensemble (Camila Canó-Flaviá and Lucy Taylor as social workers, Cody Kostro and Piter Marek as neighborhood boys) are not working hard. Running between several parts, they speed through the concrete underpass set and various quick-changes (both appealingly designed by Anna Fleischle).

But their hyperkinesis makes the play’s two and a half hour runtime taxing, even as the narrative and the central trio’s performances become more engaging. Harrison comes in hot, launching into what is almost an act-length monologue that jumps from a recovery group back to the night of the accident, filling in his biographical details and finally his first night in jail. (All the while, Alexandra Faye Braithwaite’s clubby music and Robbie Butler’s lighting never let up.)

There’s no praise high enough for Harrison, who runs out onto an audience that, at least at the performance I attended, started out largely unresponsive – not from coming in with folded arms or raised eyebrows, but simply because they’d been stunned into silence by the loud expectation of an instant buy-in.

It’s a very British trend, these past few years, to treat stage works with the experiential obliviousness of films, which play on whether anyone’s watching or not. It can be thrilling, when done right, to have your collar immediately grabbed by a rock-steady directorial hand, sensorial health be damned. (See: The Who’s Tommy). But it’s only when Clark and Robards (freed from their own ensemble roles) begin working with the social worker that Punch allows them to catch their breath, acknowledge the essential time-and-space element of theatre and expend that breath into their characters, rather than their blocking.

That comes courtesy of the script, and of Penford and movement director Leanne Pinder’s work, which is ultimately commendable. There’s nothing bad to really say, on the face of it. To give them credit, they’re tasked with whipping up excitement out of a first act that could mostly be cut. Maybe it’s because of Harrison’s dropped-in performance that it feels this way. He inhabits his character so completely that there’s no need for him to wax Graham’s poetics about life in government housing, Dunne’s upbringing and the circumstances that led to that fateful night: We know exactly who this guy is the minute we meet him.

Yet we’re made to go through the motions – and, in this production, these are motions – with hardly any fresh insight. Once the protagonists arrive at their reconciliatory table, you understand why this is a story worth telling, and there’s not a dry eye in the house. Isn’t it nice to just sit down and talk?

Punch is in performance at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on West 47th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.