Ian McKellen proves age is no barrier to laughter: PATRICK MARMION reviews Frank and Percy
Frank and Percy – Theatre Royal, Windsor
How about this for under-represented minorities? Eighty-four-year-old Ian McKellen and soon to be 70-year-old Roger Allam in a gently carbonated comedy about a couple of old codgers who fall in love while walking their dogs.
The play’s two wobbly necked heroes – like their beloved mutts Bruno and Toffee – have not a chin between them.
McKellen is a dowdy, semi-retired sociology professor from Whitby who regrets that his relationship with former husband Denis broke down because they ‘couldn’t make it work after Princess Margaret died’. Allam is a marginally more presentable ex-history teacher who lost his wife Alice to a brain tumour.
PATRICK MARMION: How about this for under-represented minorities? Eighty-four-year-old Ian McKellen and soon to be 70-year-old Roger Allam in a gently carbonated comedy about a couple of old codgers who fall in love while walking their dogs
The charming thing about Ben Weatherill’s left-field romcom is that it’s rooted in the inconsequential trivia of everyday life. They bond over Pontefract cake, natter about long-lost dads, recall hip replacements, pop blood pressure pills, share fun facts about watermelon and eventually get around to test driving a smooch.
Although barely out of shorts, Weatherill has a mature and fond feel for life in old age. His play is full of psychological nuance – crabbiness and levity – as the two men’s attachment grows on them (and us) like creeper. But as a stealth comedy there are at least four episodes of a TV sitcom buried here, and brilliant lines include McKellen’s stoical remark, ‘We’ve got half an hour before the Viagra kicks in.’
Both men are sexually, medically and psychologically candid in the way only old folk can be.
Nor is there any proselytising about sexual politics. The nearest it comes to controversy is Allam’s Frank discovering that McKellen’s Percy has a mildly alarming line in climate change denial. But a bit like in Allam’s Radio 4 comedy with Joanna Lumley, Conversations From A Long Marriage, the two creaking old timers fit each other perfectly.
Performed on a set of rotating decking with a view of Hampstead Heath’s woodlands projected beyond, the action moseys inventively through a tea room, pub, M&S shop floor, vet’s surgery, restaurant and cemetery. And although the shadow of death inevitably falls across Sean Mathias’s warmly affable production, he ensures the tone is rueful yet chipper, and light as a cheese souffle.
At two and a half hours, it is a little long for comedy. But who doesn’t want to see McKellen in a tutu, Allam mixing shiny rainbow shorts with socks and sandals, or the pair of them howling like geriatric canines at a karaoke bar?
Both men are sexually, medically and psychologically candid in the way only old folk can be (pictured on This Morning on June 1)
