Still, My Name Is Lucy Barton is much larger and far more resonant than the sum of these parts. ‘Lucy Barton’ Review: Laura Linney Finds Her Perfect Match. The magic that pulses in a book can disintegrate when these same words are interpreted by a performer who isn’t, as it were, on the same page. It sounds like one of those inspirational survivor stories, of success against the odds, which are regularly packaged for mass consumption. The novel – narrated by the protagonist from the vantage point of the future, both with the benefit of hindsight and the unreliability of memory – takes places over five nights in the mid-1980s. This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter,” says one of the characters in this novel. Strout’s lack of sentimentality creates a powerful image of a childhood steeped not just in financial hardship, but in cultural and emotional deprivation: Lucy’s is a childhood devoid of books, magazines, TV, neighbours. Review: Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton is an exploration of memory. On the contrary, as embodied with middle-American forthrightness by a perfectly cast Laura Linney, in the production that opened Wednesday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Lucy may be the most translucent figure now on a New York stage. You will have only one.”. A New York writer who grew up in rural Illinois, Lucy Barton is surely someone we can trust to speak plain. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Theatre Review by Howard Miller - January 15, 2020. Lucy did not, though. Open this photo in gallery: The new novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout, shown in … Elizabeth Strout’s atmospheric novel, “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” comes to the stage as a glum, gray dud. Paul T Davies reviews Laura Linney in My Name Is Lucy Barton now playing at the Bridge Theatre Laura Linney in My Name Is Lucy Barton. Tickets Through Feb. 29 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater; manhattantheatreclub.com. But her slender, tremendously affecting 2016 novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton, is as direct, deceptively straightforward and singularly focused as its title implies. 2/12 My Name is Lucy Barton - in pictures. And using the artfully shaded directness she has shown both on film (“You Can Count on Me”) and stage (“Sight Unseen,” “The Little Foxes”), Linney indeed acts the way that Strout writes. “My Name Is Lucy Barton” — like all of Strout’s fiction — is more complex than it first appears, and all the more emotionally persuasive for it. In Elizabeth Strout’s deeply affecting novel, the eponymous heroine endeavours to make sense of her story in spite of the vagaries of memory, the power of collective denial and the masterful ability of those closest to her to shroud her emotional needs in misunderstandings and repression. The title character of “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” Rona Munro’s crystalline stage adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 novel, is hardly a woman of mystery. Laura Linney as a New York writer recalling her past in “My Name Is Lucy Barton” at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. Feelings seem to register on her face before her thoughts have a chance to catch up with them, so that we know when she’s hurting or happy almost before she does. Cast: Laura Linney. Back by popular demand, the show returned to the London stage in 2019, and will be making its Broadway debut in January 2020. Scenic and costumes design by Bob Crowley. This is a glorious novel, deft, tender and true. ), Linney and Strout, in contrast, are almost seamlessly well-matched. It evokes these connections in a style so spare, so pure and so profound the book almost seems to be a kind of scripture or sutra, if a very down-to-earth and unpretentious one ― Newsday. Photo: Matthew Murphy. It's clear that Lucy's mother, Lydia, remembers certain things very … If she hadn’t already won the Pulitzer for Olive Kitteridge, this new novel would surely be a contender. Still, My Name Is Lucy Barton is much larger and far more resonant than the sum of these parts. Lucy was raised in extreme poverty by parents who were not able to nurture and show her love in the manner that most children need. The title character of “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” Rona Munro’s crystalline stage adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 novel, is hardly a woman of mystery. But when Lucy says she has become ruthless — as those who first knew she wanted to be a writer advised her she would have to be — we believe her. --San Francisco Chronicle "A short novel about love, particularly the complicated love between mothers and daughters, but also simpler, more sudden bonds . Unexpectedly, her mother, from whom she has been estranged for years, arrives at her bedside. Read it. Manuel Harlan. This review is from June 2018. Video projections and changes in lighting transform the hospital-room set into scenes from Lucy Barton’s Illinois childhood. My Name Is Lucy Barton review – unspoken truths and new beginnings. My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout, book review. When Lucy speaks as her mother, it’s with a sort of descriptive physical shorthand, conjuring sharp edges and a nasal twang. ), a short, stark novel about the ways we break and maintain the bonds of family. Not only does her illness afford her nine weeks of daily visits from a kindly Jewish doctor “to whom I felt a deep attachment”, it brings her mother rushing to her bedside, with the possibility not just of reconciliation, but of cure: “Her being there, using my pet name, which I had not heard in ages, made me feel warm and liquid-filled, as though all my tension had been a solid thing and now was not.” With her mother holding vigil, Lucy is relieved of the insomnia that has plagued her in hospital: “That night I slept without waking, and in the morning my mother was sitting where she had been the day before.”, Lucy may be hoping for an emotional reunion, but her mother embarks on a series of anecdotes about people they once knew – friends, relations, acquaintances – whose failed marriages and emotional breakdowns are recounted like cautionary morality tales. If … See all 1,210 critical reviews › RunSueRun. 7 June 2018 4 Stars Book Now. Laura Linney pours the breath of life into Broadway's My Name Is Lucy Barton, based on the novel by Olive Kitteridge author Elizabeth Strout. Linney’s presence here is deferential, almost shy. But Strout can go emotionally large as well. It doesn’t flop hard — with its limited ambition, it has no height from which to fall. Laura Linney in My Name Is Lucy Barton. Strout avoids sentimentality by imbuing Lucy's narrative with a pervasive sense of uncertainty ... My Name is Lucy Barton review: Laura Linney is compelling and careful in one-woman show. But “My Name Is Lucy Barton” is the story of a daughter who loved her mother, and that is a very different story. Lucy’s mother is unable to tell her daughter she loves her except “when your eyes are closed” and there is a quietly devastating tragedy about the way Lucy endeavours to make peace with this: “I feel that people may not understand that my mother could never say the words I love you… It was all right.” And yet this is a novel about love: about the complicated, complex love between a mother and daughter. (Video design by Luke Halls, which turns the hospital window into an aperture onto a hazy past, is fine, though I could have done without the intrusive melancholy music.). This is a glorious novel, deft, tender and true. Christina Patterson. My Name Is Lucy Barton confirms Strout as a powerful storyteller immersed in the nuances of human relationships, weaving family tapestries with compassion, wisdom and insight. Given My Name Is Lucy Barton's distinguished literary cache and the casting of Linney to narrate Lucy's story the staged monologue Rona Munro has fashioned from its source had me arrive at the Friedman with high hopes that it would display sturdy enough theatrical legs to add it to my memory book of genuinely stage-worthy solo plays. My Name Is Lucy Barton tells the story of a woman, named Lucy, as she recovers from an illness and tries to make sense of/peace with her complicated relationship with her mother. The caricature in the imitation underscores the distance between what Lucy came from and what she has become. Click here to order a copy for £10.39, An exploration of the love between mother and daughter is both affecting and wise, Olive Kitteridge box set review – a darkly knotted mess of lust, crime, affairs and heartbreak. Nor do I mean those moments in which Lucy, recalling a loveless childhood in poverty on an isolated farm, slams on the brakes of her narrative as she stumbles on a memory she would rather not talk about now. This review is from June 2018. As a storyteller, Strout’s Lucy is almost apologetic in her humility. It's clear that Lucy's mother, Lydia, remembers certain things very differently to the way Lucy does. ‘My Name is Lucy Barton’ returns in January 2019.I have not read Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 novel ‘My Name is Lucy Barton’. My Name is Lucy Barton - in pictures. And they of course aren’t the whole truth. It is for her daughter to fill in those gaps for us, with accounts of the kind of numbing, oppressive and outright abusive existence that so many people accept as a life sentence. 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