Frank and Percy review

Allam and McKellen are wonderfully watchable, sharing an easy, believable chemistry and wringing laughs and bittersweet emotion from the intentionally mundane dialogue. McKellen’s witty, intellectual Percy is by turns dry and charming, prickly and tender, but prone to lashing out when he feels he’s losing control. When his health begins to fail, he crumples, becoming doddery and distracted, almost childlike in his fragility. Allam’s Frank is the more reserved of the two, but also the more compassionate. Holding his emotions tightly in check at first, he opens up gradually, and by the end of the play is wearing his heart on his sleeve, freed from either shame or need. Allam makes the journey feel clear and completely plausible.

Mathias keeps the slowly paced production on just the right side of sentimentality. Poignant moments are balanced by a handful of fun set pieces – a karaoke sequence is pulled off with particular flair – and the whole production is suffused with a mood of elegiac hopefulness.

Morgan Large’s pretty set features a circular, multilevel deck of wooden beams. Understated use of a revolve sees a number of wooden plinths slickly realigned into new configurations to suggest various indoor and outdoor locations, while the rear wall splits open to create a window on to a visually striking still image of lush green woodland where Frank and Percy’s dogs run and play together, always just out of sight.