Laura Linney’s remarkable debut
My Name Is Lucy Barton Bridge Theatre, London SE1
‘It was many years ago now, when I had to stay in a hospital for almost nine weeks.” So begins Elizabeth Strout’s bestselling novella of 2016, and so begins Rona Munro’s deft adaptation of the book, which brings the multi Emmy award-winning American actress Laura Linney on to the British stage for the first time.
It’s not just any old stage she walks on to, wearing simple black trousers, flat shoes and a baggy, deeppocketed cardigan, wreathed in scarves – but that of the gleaming new 900-seater Bridge. Faintly terrifying, I’d imagine, when it’s just you, on your own, with only a hospital bed and an armchair as points of refuge.
Yet if there’s fear in Linney, it’s tucked inside a sustained, concerted smile of serenity that warms the auditorium just as potently as Peter Mumford’s lighting bathes Richard Eyre’s typically astute production.
And if there’s a prime reason why the material earns its keep as a 90-minute theatrical experience, it’s that there’s a stirring affinity between the courage required of the actress and the resolve required of the everywoman figure she’s playing.
Bad things have happened to Lucy Barton in the hazy distant past, growing up dirt-poor and subject to abusive neglect, loneliness her middle name, in rural Illinois. Memories swim into view as she battles a mysterious, possibly life-threatening illness in the mid-eighties, gazing from a too-costly hospital room out on to the Chrysler Building, while being watched over by her estranged mother.
Linney plays the heroine who at times inhabits, to comic effect, the spikier persona of her mother, softer in age but still forbidding. The pair casually sift their lives over a remembered five nights of companionship. It’s a process akin to writing itself and Barton, latterly a successful author (evident shades of autobiography for Strout in this), links the ineffable familial healing process with her own numinous vocation.
The original’s prose has a colloquial ease to it (“This is what I want to think… this is what I think”); at one level it’s speech, but it’s interior too, a kind of soul-music. The evening honours that, avoiding the temptation to turn hesitant observations into distinct scenes. The surprise – disappointment maybe for some – is there’s so little recriminatory ire; this isn’t a “hospital drama”.
Linney is perhaps best known in the UK for playing the unlucky-in-romance graphic designer Sarah in Love, Actually. And love, actually, is the prevailing theme here: a wistful coming to terms with what’s been and gone, including the marriage that Barton has walked out on, a world of ghosts. It could all be terribly pat in its attainment of “closure”, but Linney’s gift, as she clasps her hands and darts a glance elsewhere, is to suggest a trembling tightrope-walk across lingering despair.
The beautiful video design shifts vistas in and out of focus: Manhattan, desolate fields, the rainsplashed windscreen of the truck Lucy was locked in as a child. But it’s also what you project – what you bring with you – that makes the night.