The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘My tip? Avoid going into cardiac arrest’
Laura Linney monologues for 90 minutes in ‘My Name Is Lucy Barton’ . She tells Elizabeth Grice how it feels
The one-person show is a strange, unnerving beast. Laura Linney tells me that when she made her London theatre debut last June in My Name Is Lucy Barton she was entering unknown territory – and felt utterly exposed. For 90 uninterrupted minutes, Linney held the stage of London’s vast new Bridge Theatre alone, with only a hospital bed and an armchair for props. As Lucy Barton, a woman examining the unhappy palimpsest of her life, the words spooled out of her as if in the moment of thinking them, as if she were talking to a friend. At the most basic level, her dramatic monologue was an astounding feat of memory. How did she do it?
“I have no answer for you but I’ve never been so scared,” she says. “Learning it is huge. You just do it sentence by sentence and try to be as calm with yourself as you can possibly be. You befriend each sentence so it goes in deeply and personally and with detail that resonates within.”
With so much information in her brain, she was afraid that one evening her memory would let her down. When inevitably it did, she was ready, unfazed, forgiving. “Sure, it happened, and it will happen again, I’ve no doubt. No one is a machine. We are fallible human beings. I just try to ease through it as opposed to going into a state of cardiac arrest.” Not that anyone seems to have noticed. If there was indeed a prompt in the first two performances, says the director Richard Eyre, “it was not detectable by me”.
Their one-on-one rehearsals in Brooklyn, where Linney lives, had been intense. “I was sitting in a room for three weeks and she was talking to me,” Eyre recalls. “But that’s a world away from doing it in a 900-seater theatre. It’s alchemical. It’s astonishing that she could have achieved that feeling of intimacy with virtually no props.”
He marvels at her ability to make characters transparent. “You can see their feelings, like the skin revealing the veins. She can calibrate those feelings and navigate them with such precision, yet make you feel it’s completely natural.”
Despite jet-lag, Linney looks box-fresh, in a studied sort of way, with a mass of creamy hair and a lovely, mobile face predisposed to laughter. Now the “extreme fear” of the first run of Lucy Barton is behind her, she hopes to reprise the role this month with something approaching enjoyment. “It’s been hibernating in me. I unearth it every once in a while and dig out a line. I’ll wake it back up slowly over the next few weeks. It’s dormant but it’s still alive.”
Elizabeth Strout, whose novel is the basis for the play, hoped that if ever her book were dramatised, the luminous Linney would play Lucy because of her honesty in conveying complex emotion. It was a perfect match for the quiet American. Linney had been seized by the book’s “glorious language that goes right to the heart of growing up”. Even now, at 54 and decorated with awards, she doesn’t claim to be completely grown up herself. “There are moments when I feel, you know, seven. It [maturity] comes and goes. It’s not a fixed state. I wish it were a rung on ladders going up, but it’s not that way for me.”
Linney is from a strong theatrical family but her parents split up when she was an infant and later she would criss-cross New York City between their houses. Her father was the prominent playwright Romulus Linney, her mother a hospital nurse working 12-hour shifts. She identified with the loneliness in Lucy Barton. “My situation was vastly different from Lucy Barton’s. I was certainly not malnourished, nor was I uncared for or unloved. I had all of those things in spades. But I did spend long hours alone as a child and there are inner resources you draw on, inner corners of your spirit that you explore…”
While studying acting, her summers were spent working as a stagehand in small theatres, not knowing in which part of the theatre she would end up, but certain she would find her place.She seems to have arrived at stardom almost by stealth, steadily collecting Golden Globes and Emmys and a clutch of nominations in film, television