Absurdly prolific as he is, it sometimes feels like we could do with cloning playwright James Graham a few times. His reassuringly familiar but diverse body of work has done so much to bring obscure chapters of recent history to life – from the whipping operation of the hung 1970s Labour parliament to the 1968 television clashes between Gore Vidal and William F Buckley Jr – that it feels faintly bleak pondering the great stories that one James Graham alone has to let slide.
Punch, which originated at the Nottingham Playhouse last year, is the perfect example of what he does. It tells the poignant story of Jacob (David Shields), a lad from Nottingham who got into a totally pointless fight – if you can even call it that – with James, a (never-seen) paramedic just a few years older than him. On a big night out, Jacob punched James precisely once. James went down, and a couple of weeks later he died, his life support switched off following a bleed to the brain.
Graham’s script delves into this with typical deftness: arguably his plays all amount to really, really good explainers. We get the incident and also its profoundly complicated aftermath. But we also get a forensic dive into Jacob’s life, his journey from a sweet primary schooler who loves his single mum to his gradual falling in with the wrong crowd, as undiagnosed neurological conditions and the roughness of his estate begin to bite.
Shields is terrific as Jacob: his performance is a modulated study in the ferocity but also the innocence and vulnerability of a young offender. He’s led to a dark place, in part, by his refusal to think through what he’s doing or to engage with the consequences of his actions. For ages he avoids accepting what he did, twitchily referring to it as ‘the accident’. But when James’s parents get in touch via a mediation service, Jacob finds himself forced to own his actions. Shields’s voice disintegrates into anguished semi-incoherency as he finally attempts to articulate what he did.
In the second half Punch moves on to unexpectedly happier territory. Graham, a working-class East Midlands writer himself, is fascinated by social mobility and the traps people are born into. It’s not a case of it being a heartwarming tale of redemption or Jacob being forgiven. But Graham is good at analysing and, yes, explaining the remarkable trajectory of Jacob’s life, his story broken down into forensic bites of reminiscence, narrated by Shields and the five other cast members, who take on a multitude of roles.
A transfer from a theatre that suffered devastating funding cuts last year, Punch doesn’t have the budget of the typical Young Vic show. Anna Fleische’s concrete underpass set is evocative but unshowy; Adam Penford’s direction is efficient but hardly flashy. Even Graham’s text feels more stripped back and businesslike than his more widescreen works like Dear England, which returns to the National Theatre in a couple of weeks. But it’s not like he just knocked it out: Punch is on the smaller side for a James Graham play, but its climax will have you blubbing. He can’t tell every story, but once again you’ll be grateful he told this one.
