Punch at the Young Vic review: 'a tragic true story turned into devastating theatre'

Telling someone the basic outline of this play - the true story of 19 year old Jacob Dunne who threw a single punch at James Hodgkinson outside a pub in 2011 and killed him - is inevitably going to do it a disservice. It would be more helpful to say: bring tissues. Because it’s what happened next, and it’s how the great documenter of our times James Graham deals with it, that turns a tragic story into a truly devastating piece of theatre.

It’s a play set in Nottingham (it was commissioned by Nottingham Playhouse and comes to London after a very buzzy run there) which has the city at its heart: its estates and clubs, its nicer bits and nastier bits and the gulf of inequality between the two. But its fury and empathy are universal.