Written by Ben Weatherill

Directed by Sean Mathias

Review by Dominic Corr

The two-hander park-bench show, where drama and comedy belay a more personal narrative of self-discovery, is far from a ground-breaking concept. However, if done right with solid performances and enticing hooks, they can pry open unexplored avenues. Frank and Percy, despite its stage-legacy casting and canny director in Sean Mathias, rifles through unfulfilling motions in an undemanding wander through a prospering friendship that blossoms into something intimate.

There are few better places to meet new people than walking the dog on Hampstead Heath: a pair of dogs yap and bark in the peripherals of the Other Palace stage space (thanks to Andy Graham’s sound design), a recently widowed Frank (Roger Allam) patiently waits for his dog Toffee to make a return from her adventures. Sparking a casual conversation is the merrily single Percy, his small talk shifting from the plights of ageing (dodgy hips and hearing aids) into the most riveting of all topics: the rain. Disarmingly mundane: that’s the crux of Ben Weatherill’s two-hander.

Enabling too wide a development – to the extent it drags down the production’s already limited momentum, Weatherill’s script balances personality and comedy with the gradual emergence of a more intimate conversational manner. It turns Frank and Percy into people-watching: an enjoyable pastime, but the hiccup is that in offering the audience the opportunity to grow to know the pair individually before the romantic element flourishes, this natural style means the beats become predictable, even contrite and restricts Allam and McKellen’s performances, causing inert offerings for the first act.

Nudging the pair on – Mathias’ direction has been a light-touch thus far, spread thin across the initial scenes and relying heavily on the calibre of Allam and McKellen’s capabilities to carry the lengthier conversations – and they do, somewhat. Frank and Percy feels remarkably organic and authentic in areas, but this slower hands-off approach results in an experience so smooth and undisturbed that even the slightest of bumps become mountainous issues.

It causes McKellen to become somewhat complacent. McKellen is at his best when bearing a bit more fang as Percy. It pushes the role closer to the comedic, drawing a relish as the pair begins to bicker and stray into the more exciting avenues of dispute such as Percy’s quarrelsome views on the climate crisis colliding with Allam’s persistent nature to avoid the confrontation and debate.

A significant high-point for the show and McKellen’s performance, the second act plunges itself headfirst into a pre-Pride costume switch-up that is carried with heaps of McKellen’s trademark flourish, and a more apprehensive Allam as Frank encounters new dimensions of his sexual identity and expressing it on a more visual (and obvious) scale. It results in a stark departure from Nick Riching’s otherwise pleasant and dawn-heavy lighting, into the pulses of a karaoke bar or the clinical wash-out of a hospital.

What carries much of the production is Allam’s bumbling and withdrawn characterisation – imparting Frank with weathered pride and a refreshing triteness as a man who grew uneventfully into his later years without much of a diversion from the path (well, minus that one time with the neighbours) before the passing of his wife, Alice. Allam deftly wanders the space of Morgan Large’s wooden set, a circle with sequential breaks that often rotate to break up the inertia a tad.

Even with a welcomingly natural depiction of desire and romance in middle age that is commendable, and the looming avenues of ill-health and socio-political differences intruding upon this renewed sense of happiness for the pair, the play has no clarity in direction and build-up, floating somewhat with a comfortable sense of limbo. Frustratingly despite possessing genuine pathos threaded into the script and with elements of sharp humour from two of the nation’s celebrated and adept stage and screen performers, Frank and Percy comes over as disappointingly routine.

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