GANG LIFE, GRIEF AND GREATNESS
There is a very tense moment late on in the second half when Jacob Dunne, only just holding himself together, finally sits down in person opposite the parents of the young man he killed two years earlier with a single punch outside a Nottingham pub. The victim’s father David explicitly will not forgive; the mother, Joan, is set on somehow doing so but in this moment suddenly begins talking, urgently, unstoppably, about her son James and her loving memories of his life. Dunne sits rigid, every effort in listening , looking making himself take in her grief.
We know the outcome: James Graham’s play is based, co-operatively, with Dunne’s book RIGHT FROM WRONG, a remarkable chronicle of successful “restorative justice” and personal redemption after his prison sentence . But the strength of the drama, and notablly of young David Shields’ performance, is in that moment of real dread. We know it will be OK, more than OK, beautifully so. But it might not have been. That meeting might have been a disaster. ALmost the most useful thing about Graham’s flawless pace and storytelling, and director Adam Penford’s willingness to hold these moments, is that it doesn’t make restorative justice easy or cuddly. It is a tough business, and this is a tough play.
Tough but not dour. As it opens, we meet Jacob in the toxic flower of uncontrolled young manhood, running wild pub to pub with his mandem, his gang, coked-up, looking forward to an evening’s fight. Once or twice in a brilliant pivot he becomes the older, wiser, sadder man of today, the campaigner and youth worker, to explain what is going on. He offers memories of the better bits of his childhood in Nottingham’s “Meadows”, a failed social experiment turned ASBOland. But we see him and the others run and scramble and vault round Anna Fleischle’s set, a great metalled curve above a concrete subway, expressing both kinds of confinement (the ensemble of five owners move nimbly between parts).
After the fight – a random stupid punch for no reason – we see the news reaching James’ parents, the horror of James’ Mum, the panicked moment when the “M….r word is spoken (reduced to manslaughter later, as the fall caused the death more than the punch). Jacob, burning his clothes in fear, suddenly hears church bells and remembers his Confirmation and his childhood fishing for stickleback in the river. The playwright deftly picks up such moments from the real Jacob’s book, without sentimentalizing, moves on, holds us in the reality of the lost scared boy within the dread oaf, the s “one-punch hard man” his idiot friends applaud.
Shields holds the part remarkably, but towering through the play even more is Julie Hesmondhaldgh, her round ripe Lancashire voice holding a profound humanity even in the deepest shock and grief. She it is who looks at the first awkwardly written – slightly dyslexic – response to their questions through the restorative-justice (“RJ”) scheme when Jacob has done his sentence, and sees that he cannot just be a police mugshot: “it’s a person!”. Against her husband’s reluctance (Tony Hirst still , powerful, broken) she decides that to honour her paramedic son she must, like him, be “the best I can be. What do we do with this? What is the sense of wasting another life?” In a wonderful moment of workaday levity she tries to remember the RJ told them it the tone shouldn’t be punitive. “WHat\s the word? I keep saying..Pontefract?”
It’s a history play, this, and an important one. Nottingham Trent university sponsors it, the theatre has set up a talking-circle by the Forgiveness Project alongside it, James’ parents and others involved have been close to the process, including the Remedi charity whose sysrems are carefully explained in the text. And there are two mentions of things which saved Jacob and now are dust: since this all happened, Probation services have been incompetently privatized and the proposed rebuilding of the Meadows estate cancelled in Austerity. Also mentioned in passing is the pivot of the East Midlands from proud manufacturing to logistics and warehousing, and the contrast between the wisdom of fixing potholes early and the national failure to fix wild kids like Jacob early.
All of that could make some people swerve away, fearing educational-campaigning worthiness. It shouldn’t. Great drama feeds off truth. And this is a James Graham play: craftsmanlike, careful, agile, gripping, thoughtful and humane.
Nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk to 25 May
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