Premièred at the Theatre Royal in Windsor earlier this year, this new play by Ben Weatherill gives us a chance to see two of our finest actors, Sir Ian McKellen and Roger Allam, working wonderfully together. It isn’t a play of great moment, but it is a production that their admirers wouldn’t want to miss.
They play two ageing gentlemen, Frank (Allam), a former history teacher in his sixties, still sorely missing the wife who died from cancer four years ago, and Percy, (McKellen), perhaps a decade older but still a working academic, also now lacks a partner, though it was he put an end to a long relationship. Percy has a daughter, but she lives in Australia; Frank has a tenant, but he only helps financially. Both men are lonely.
They meet walking their dogs on Hampstead Heath when less retiring Percy starts up a conversation. We don’t actually see the dogs, they are both off the leash, but we frequently hear them through Andy Graham and Mike Taylor’s surround sound design with which the actors interact, and they obviously have an important role in these men’s lives.
Soon the pair are regularly meeting on the heath, their conversation goes from generalisations about heart attacks to more personal matters, but it is not until they have taken to dropping into a café together that Frank realises that Percy’s past relationship was with a man: Denis, who, after they broke up, irritatingly moved in just round the corner.
Frank isn’t perturbed, he once felt very close to another man, though nothing happened, he’s tempted to explore possible bisexuality when invited to Percy’s place. “Who could know that a ham and egg sandwich would be such an aphrodisiac,” quips Percy, but Frank has second thoughts before Percy’s Viagra has had effect; he’s not yet ready, but it isn’t long before he is clad in sparkly shorts joining frilly skirted Percy on an LGBT+ demonstration.
This feels a very real study of loneliness after long companionship, of the frustrations and fears of the ageing, sympathetically understood, but it is very much a comedy. Roger Allam makes Frank gentle and ordinary but open in attitude. Ian McKellen is much more tricksy, but that is entirely in character. Just look at the way that he eats a Pontefract cake, there’s a clown hiding behind all that chewing and there’s a bite to his astringent one-liners, but he couldn’t be more caring as he copes with a drunk Frank singing karaoke.
Director Sean Mathias and these actors offer a beautiful partnership. Its successive scenes are played out on designer Morgan Large’s revolving wooden decking with a vista of trees opening up when they are on the Heath. They don’t offer dramatic incident beyond an accident with one of their dogs and at a rift between Frank and Percy over a book about global warming that Percy writes, a strand that is undeveloped, but Ben Weatherill has cleverly crafted a beautiful vehicle for two excellent actors and these two deliver it superbly.