Here's the latest theatrical sign of the fascination the British stage now holds for Hollywood movie stars. Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins have crossed the water to give performances for the Edinburgh Fringe of a theatre piece already seen in Manhattan and Los Angeles.
You cannot entirely say The Guys by Anne Nelson is structured as a play. It's more of a commemorative tribute in theatrical form; an oblique, touching eulogy to valiant Manhattan fire-fighters who lost their lives while trying to save some of those caught in the twin towers' collapse on 11 September. But The Guys, which lasts some 80 minutes, lacks the big emotional punch, the cathartic release. It is, instead, an occasion of muted eloquence and a celebration of unhistrionic bravery.
There's not a touch of falseness or self-indulgence about the restrained, convincing performances of Sarandon and Robbins. The stage is bare, save for chairs, small tables and a low lectern. He wears a dark tracksuit, she a striped shirt and slacks. And although the event is billed as a "staged reading", it seems as if both of them have learned their roles. The only major problem is that these actors, used to the demands of movies, fail to adjust their voices and their personalities to the larger scale of the theatre. They are vocally underpowered. They do not project their personalities. There's too little engagement between them, except when they magically tango together. Director Jim Simpson needs to work on them.
The evening's subject matter, based on a real-life dilemma, has to do with the difficulty of conveying the essence of someone's personality, especially in the form of a funeral eulogy for a heroic fire-fighter cut down in his prime. Robbins plays a bereft fire captain who's required to deliver funeral tributes for several of his men and feels overwhelmed by the task. Sarandon's edgy, angry, astute journalist, assigned to compose eulogies the captain can deliver, asks questions about the dead heroes.
From the encounter between a woman used to dealing with words and a man ill at ease with emotion, Nelson achieves something strangely memorable. She conveys the speciality of 11 September's anguish. Faced with so much loss, the fire captain is numbed by shock. He cannot recall his men as rounded individuals: he recalls fragments, details, asides. One was always going to church picnics, another longed to discover a woman welder to marry, a third loved cooking. Yet all the journalist's eulogies, which we hear spoken, spark chords of recognition in the captain. The dead men have been captured in words after all.
? Showing at the Royal Lyceum Theatre until 16 February. Box office: 0131 226 0000.
