“I think we’ve lived through a chapter of our national life where we’ve all slightly lost faith in the country working for normal people,” says James Graham. “Whether that’s the trains, the health service, or the justice system, our institutions just feel overwhelmed. Times are really tough. And yet I’m an optimist. Because when you see the passion, and the belief, of the people who work in those institutions – the charity workers, the probation officers, the people working with young offenders… That’s what inspires me. That’s what gives me hope.”
Arguably, no-one has chronicled this chapter of British life more forensically than the Nottinghamshire-born playwright and screenwriter. From Brexit: The Uncivil War – his TV film in which Benedict Cumberbatch swapped Sherlock for the less obviously dashing figure of Vote Leave strategist Dominic Cummings – to Dear England, his Olivier Award-winning play about Gareth Southgate’s mission to reshape the culture through football, the 43-year-old has built a reputation for taking the temperature of the nation rivalled only by Adolescence writer Jack Thorne (who he jokingly refers to as his ‘nemesis’).
But while his latest play, Punch, has been hailed by the Telegraph as ‘another state-of-the-nation masterpiece’, Graham swears he doesn’t do it deliberately. “It sounds really arrogant, doesn’t it?” he smiles, talking to Weekend from his kitchen in south London. “That you’d sit down at your computer and say, ‘I’m going to make sense of this country, because I alone have my finger on the pulse’. But if you make a conscious choice to look at our systems and our institutions at their most stressed – when they are in some sort of crisis, or at a crossroads – I think you do end up saying something about our culture, and about ourselves.”
Punch is inspired by the true story of Jacob Dunne, a teenager from Nottingham who, in 2011, killed 28-year-old James Hodgkinson with a single blow in an unprovoked attack. After serving 14 months in prison for manslaughter, Dunne was homeless, unemployed and seemingly destined for a life of crime – until Joan and David, the parents of his victim, asked to meet him. What followed sparked a profound transformation, setting all three of them on a journey of hope, healing and forgiveness.
The play won rave review when it premiered at Nottingham Playhouse last year, but no-one was more astonished than Graham to learn it would be simultaneously transferring to London and New York. “I’m bewildered, is the truth,” he says. “Writing a play set in a Nottingham council estate didn’t exactly scream ‘Broadway!’ To me, it felt like an unapologetically English story about the English working classes, and British masculinity.
“But I guess, across borders, we share the same anxieties about our culture,” he adds, pointing to the global success of Adolescence, another northern English tale of toxic masculinity. “The root causes are the same – you can be in Stockport or you can be in Texas and still be fed the same content on the internet, or social media, that teaches you the wrong lessons.”
While the play makes a passionate case for the power of restorative justice, Graham says he never sets out to lecture his audience. “I never think of it in terms of me trying to say something – I prefer to ask questions and let the audience answer them, without trying to project too much of my own bias onto it,” he explains. “Though I’m sure all writers think that.”
He felt a huge responsibility to Jacob, David and Joan, he says. “I even went to stay with Jacob at his house, and he came to stay with me in London. That felt really important. I’ve done a lot of real-life stories before, but the likes of Dominic Cummings or Rupert Murdoch [the subject of his 2017 play Ink] are public figures, and there’s an expectation that maybe your story will be explored in art. But that wasn’t David, Joan and Jacob’s expectation. And obviously this is their pain, this is their trauma, which they’re still processing. So I had to work in a different way. I wrote the script with them, I sent them pages, which I would never normally do.”
The fact that Punch is a Nottingham production telling a Nottingham story is “huge for me”, says Graham. “For the first 10 or 15 years or so of my career, I found myself writing stories very much outside my community. I was really grateful to be able to walk into Westminster [the setting his breakthrough play, This House, about parliamentary whips during the 1974-79 Labour government], or Fleet Street [the setting for Ink], or the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? studio [for Quiz, his play-turned-ITV drama about the Major Charles Ingram ‘coughing’ scandal], and imagine myself in these worlds that felt so far from my own life experience in a Nottinghamshire mining village. It’s been the greatest privilege. But then, once I felt more confident and established, to be able to go to theatre and TV executives and pitch stories from my own world, that’s been brilliant.”
These own world stories range from his hit BBC drama Sherwood, which used two real-life Nottinghamshire murders as the jumping-off point for a thoughtful study of Red Wall politics, and the deep divisions left by the 1980s miners’ strikes, to the play Labour of Love, starring Martin Freeman as the MP for Kirkby-in-Ashfield, where Graham grew up.
“I should get some therapy, really – instead of spending time in Dominic Cummings’ or Rupert Murdoch’s head”
A shy child with a passion for history, he shared a house with his barmaid mother and twin sister, while his council worker dad and older brother lived three doors down the road. He discovered his more confident, flamboyant side acting in school plays, and went on to study drama at Hull University, before landing a backstage job at Nottingham’s Theatre Royal, where he’d spend hours alone in the building, dreaming of one day staging his own plays.
I’m interested to know what this son of a former mining community, with its proud history of education through the likes of the Miners’ Institutes, thinks about the narrative – prevalent in conversations around everything from Brexit to Oasis – that intellectual aspiration is somehow a betrayal of working class ‘authenticity’. Quite a lot, is the answer. “The idea that to have an intellectual hinterland, or to be curious about the world, is somehow anti-working class – that’s not the working class I grew up in,” he says. “My granddad had a passion for classical music, and taught piano. My dad was a huge fan of history. My window-cleaning stepdad voraciously read political biographies. That’s not a betrayal of the working class condition.
“Just because you do well, it doesn’t mean you become less black or less gay or less Muslim, or less a woman. But people do think that if you start to do well in your career, you need to stop referring to yourself as working class. It’s constantly demanded of me that I let go of a part of my identity. And that means we’ll never have successful working class artists – because as soon as you become successful, you’re not allowed to be working class. Sorry, that was a rant,” he laughs.
Moving to London in his early 20s, Graham got his career break as playwright-in-residence at the Finborough Theatre, where he immediately planted a marker as a very different type of dramatist: while his contemporaries were writing about sex, relationships and personal experience, he penned plays about Albert Einstein, Anthony Eden and Margaret Thatcher.
In putting these big, often controversial historical personalities on stage, he has never shied away from playing devil’s advocate, and trying to see the world from alternative points of view. “Yeah, I should get some therapy, really,” he says. “Instead of spending time in Dominic Cummings’ or Rupert Murdoch’s head.
“But theatre, in particular, is such a naturally empathetic and curious space – so different from social media, or newspaper comment threads – that you can’t just put people on stage that you agree with, and have the world reflected back at you exactly as you want. I think it’s more useful that you ask questions, as an audience, about why people are behaving the way they’re behaving.”
What is it like to know, as happened with Ink, that Rupert Murdoch is in the audience, watching the play? “Well, I was next door in the pub with a massive drink on that night,” he recalls. “But I did go and meet him afterwards. It felt like the decent thing to do. It happened again a few weeks ago, with Gordon Brown. I did a play in Edinburgh called Make It Happen, about the 2008 financial collapse, and there you are, having a glass of white wine afterwards, feeling like a massive imposter, going ‘what right do I have to put your premiership on stage, and invite you to come and see it?’”
Earlier this year, Channel 4 broadcast Graham’s terrific drama Brian & Maggie, about the fateful TV interview that contributed to Margaret Thatcher’s downfall. As someone whose life and work is strongly rooted in the scars of Thatcherism (“she does tend to loom large” he admits), it was, in many ways, the ultimate stress test of his devil’s advocacy approach. “Coming from a mining village, it wasn’t immediately easy to imagine a sympathetic portrayal of her political ideology,” he says. “But what was really exciting to me, in an uncomfortable way, was writing it as a celebration of how she engaged in debate, and enjoyed an argument, instead of just turning up with well-rehearsed talking points, like politicians to today. So that was my way into trying to empathise with and even, dare I say, celebrate Margaret Thatcher.”
Maggie would certainly have approved of Graham’s work rate: since 2005, he has written more than 30 plays, plus eight screenplays. But it hasn’t come without a personal cost – a pattern of isolating friends, sabotaging relationships and even forgetting to eat – and a few years ago he sought help from Workaholics Anonymous. “Workaholic is a phrase that people use casually, but it’s also an actual diagnosed challenge that people suffer from,” he says. “I feel uncomfortable talking about it, because it feels like the most hashtag first world problem in the world – ‘I’ve got too much work! I’m too successful!’ But I’ve consciously tried to overcome that discomfort in order to advocate for solutions to what is a real problem.”
His own recovery is still very much a work in progress, he admits. “If you spoke to an alcoholic or a drug addict, they’d tell you you’re never not an addict. And my challenge has always been that my drink, my drug, is something that makes me really happy. So I’m not quite sure how to square that circle. But I’m aware I’ve not always got a healthy relationship with work.”
Today being a good example: following his breakfast appointment with Weekend, Graham is heading off to watch a run-through of Dear England, ahead of its regional tour, before nipping over to the set of the BBC TV adaptation. Then, later in the week, he’s off to New York to oversee Punch rehearsals on Broadway. “Yeah, I’ve not nailed it at all,” he says. “It’s still a disaster zone.”
The four-part Dear England TV series – which will see Joseph Fiennes reprising his acclaimed National Theatre performance as Gareth Southgate, alongside Jodie Whittaker as football psychologist Pippa Grange – and the touring production are based on the updated version Graham wrote to incorporate the 2024 Euro championships. Which, early in the tournament, looked like ending in disaster for Southgate’s England.
“There were definitely some sleepless nights around that time,” admits Graham. “I was in Germany for the first couple of games, and was in a real existential crisis about it, thinking, ‘this new ending is going to be shit if we go out in the group stages’. There entire nation seemed to have a brief wobble about the Gareth Southgate project, wondering whether it was all smoke and mirrors.
“People seemed to be falling out of love with the England team again – and I was as guilty as anyone. I lost my faith. And then there we were, in our second consecutive Euros semi-final, and then our first ever final on foreign soil. So while I didn’t quite get the ending the audience would have liked – England lifting the trophy – it at least gave me an ending I could work with.”
As, indeed, did the story of Jacob, Joan and David in Punch. “Jacob freely admits he would probably have got back into that re-offending cycle – he’d have been back in jail, time and again, harming people, harming himself,” says Graham. “And it was this incredible act of forgiveness, and kindness, on behalf of the people he’d harmed the most, who’d basically saved his life.
“For me, that is such an unusually hopeful outcome. Which is what I like to write. I don’t want theatre to be a tough night out that leaves you feeling really low about humanity. I prefer theatre to be hopeful, so that you leave feeling good about people, and their potential. That feels like a really important thing to do.”
Punch is at the Apollo Theatre, London, until 29 November
An edited version of this article was published in Waitrose Weekend on 30 October, 2025
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