B'way Review: Punch

Will Harrison (center) in Punch.
Credit: Matthew Murphy

It’s going to be very difficult to resist writing the obvious praise for Punch, James Graham’s hard-hitting British import presented by Manhattan Theater Club in association with Nottingham Playhouse on Broadway. Yes, it’s a haymaker, it’s a gut-punch, it will send you reeling and stunned out of the theater. But these accolades seem like hollow cliches compared to the visceral, emotionally rending experience of this show.

Based on Right from Wrong, the memoir written by Jacob Dunne the main real-life character in the play, Punch centers on the life-changing impact that a single blow struck in blind, unreasoning rage can have. Jacob (Will Harrison in a career-making Broadway debut) is an angry, working-class young man in England’s suffocating public housing jungle. During a marathon pub crawl, he punches a random stranger which results in a smashed skull, brain bleeding, and death. In cinematic terms, playwright Graham (who previously expertly covered Rupert Murdoch’s domination of the scandal press in Ink) and director Adam Penford explore the ramifications of the harrowing incident, both from Jacob’s point of view and that of Joan and David, the devastated parents of the victim (Victoria Clark and Sam Robards in heartbreaking, multilayered performances).