Broadway play Punch’s excellent, visceral title is also the dark heart of the true story that inspired its making.

In 2011, Jacob Dunne, then 19, killed trainee paramedic James Hodgkinson, 28, with a single punch while out drunk one night in the English city of Nottingham. Dunne served a 14-month prison sentence for James’ manslaughter, but his life turned around when James’ parents, Joan Scourfield and David Hodgkinson, reached out to him via a restorative justice program.

Beyond their grief and anger over their son’s senseless murder, Joan and David wanted some good to come from it, and that good, they determined, was Dunne’s rehabilitation, as well as campaigning for awareness around the danger of the single punch. Ultimately, the parents of the man he killed became Jacob Dunne’s mo

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