My Name is Lucy Barton review: Laura Linney is compelling and careful in one-woman show

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Fiona Mountford7 June 2018

At first I feared I wouldn’t get along with Lucy Barton. This Lucy Barton, at least, as there is a danger inherent in opening up something small and perfectly formed, in this case Elizabeth Strout’s marvellous 2016 novel which is essentially a monologue, and exposing its intimacies in a big space, namely the almost bare stage of the 900-seat Bridge Theatre. Constant mitigation, however, is provided by that outstanding American actress, three-time Oscar nominee Laura Linney, who gives a compelling 90-minute solo performance full of her trademark nervous smiles.

The bulk of the narrative concerns a pivotal time, ‘many years ago’, when Lucy endured a prolonged stay in a New York hospital and was visited by her long-estranged mother. Lucy and siblings had suffered an impoverished and sometimes abusive rural childhood and this visit had the potential to be a time of reckoning. Yet she hadn’t bargained for her mother’s capacity to avoid confronting the difficult truths of the past nor, more importantly, for the fierce love she would feel for her parent despite it all.

Rona Munro has skilfully and faithfully adapted – filleted, really - Strout’s novel and Linney, dressed in outdoor clothes, plays both women in the stark hospital room. Initially, this lack of an interlocutor feels odd and too-obvious changes of lighting states and sound design jar. Yet gradually, inexorably, Richard Eyre’s production softens and begins to feel organic. It makes sense of Strout’s deceptively simple three-layer timeline, a pyramid of palimpsests and possibly unreliable memories, to have just one actor recounting it all and Linney carefully demonstrates how Lucy is shaping the story, like the novelist she later reveals she has become.

We long for the hard-hitting incidents to be unpacked a little, but that’s not Strout’s style. Instead she fashions exquisite cameo-like depictions of lives in an unassuming community, which Linney relishes: Lucy’s hatred of a cold house led her to stay behind after school in a warm classroom, resulting in ultimate academic success – and an escape route. Impressive.

The best theatre to see in June

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Until June 23

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