But “My Name Is Lucy Barton” is the story of a daughter who loved her mother, and that is a very different story. Theatre Review by Howard Miller - January 15, 2020. Every breath of Linney’s performance acknowledges this contradiction. 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. 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. And I Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. I mean: It is true …” That final affirmation rings slightly hollow. Adapted by Rona Munro. ), a short, stark novel about the ways we break and maintain the bonds of family. 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. When Lucy says, with a satisfaction that’s bigger than happiness, that “all life amazes me,” we feel exactly what she means. Read more. Why? It sounds like one of those inspirational survivor stories, of success against the odds, which are regularly packaged for mass consumption. This review is from June 2018. Linney’s presence here is deferential, almost shy. My Name is Lucy Barton does not conform to any of the conventional ideas about dramatic structure. Review My Name Is Lucy Barton. Published: 11 Dec 2016 My Name Is Lucy Barton review – unspoken truths and new beginnings. Elizabeth Strout’s atmospheric novel, “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” comes to the stage as a glum, gray dud. My Name is Lucy Barton is a 2016 New York Times bestselling novel and the fifth novel by the American writer Elizabeth Strout. As for subjects closer to their Amgash, Ill., home, especially Lucy’s tormented father, her mother sidesteps those with discomfort and disapproval. As a storyteller, Strout’s Lucy is almost apologetic in her humility. ... My Name is Lucy Barton review: Laura Linney is compelling and careful in one-woman show. This is where many years ago, a younger Lucy spent nearly nine weeks of her existence, with a life-threatening infection that is never fully identified. My Name is Lucy Barton - in pictures. “Except I do know it, I think. Give her time; she’ll come back to it. Lucy did not, though. Through Lucy Barton, Strout has made a remarkable virtue of the novelist's trick - often missed - of telling enough but not too much. While I hope for all my books to provide the reader with a kind of intimate experience this one seems particularly available for that, I think. If … Praise for My Name Is Lucy Barton “A quiet, sublimely merciful contemporary novel about love, yearning, and resilience in a family damaged beyond words.”—The Boston Globe “It is Lucy’s gentle honesty, complex relationship with her husband, and nuanced response to her mother’s shortcomings that make this novel so subtly powerful.” Aside to Everyone Else: Read the book, and you will know why this is a compliment. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99. 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. Laura Linney as a New York writer recalling her past in “My Name Is Lucy Barton” at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. But “My Name Is Lucy Barton” is the story of a daughter who loved her mother, and that is a very different story. My Name is Lucy Barton, Bridge Theatre, London, review: Laura Linney is luminous in this one-woman show. You will have only one.”. More more on … That’s part of what makes life so sad; it is an even larger part of what makes life so wondrously fascinating. This review is from June 2018. Lucy is now a successful writer, but her mother’s presence reignites memories of her childhood – of poverty, abuse and social exclusion: “We were oddities, our family, even in that tiny rural town of Amgash, Illinois.”, The descriptions of Lucy’s formative years are visceral and heartbreaking. 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. 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. Do read "My Name Is Lucy Barton" first to fully appreciate "Anything Is Possible." MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON is a short 200 page novella jam-packed with emotional substance. Strout conveys immense poignancy in the solace Lucy manages to take from these interactions nonetheless: “I was so happy. 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." Lucy Barton has been in hospital for three weeks with an undiagnosed illness after having her appendix removed. To order a copy for £10.39 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. In this follow-up to My Name Is Lucy Barton, sharply compassionate stories find suffering, pity and grace in smalltown America Elizabeth Lowry Sat … The story begins with Lucy, now a published fiction writer, remembering a time, 20 or more years ago, when she was felled by an undiagnosable disease, a sort of visitation of sickness, and ended up in a New York City hospital for a prolonged stay. It is the silences, the ellipses in conversations that articulate the emotional truths of relationships. (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.). . Her trajectory from childhood to college, to marriage and motherhood, and ultimately to a career as a successful fiction writer, is fairly conventional in summary. It's clear that Lucy's mother, Lydia, remembers certain things very differently to the way Lucy does. Reviewed by Fiona Mountford; Thursday 7 June 2018 08:00 36 people found this helpful. Still, My Name Is Lucy Barton is much larger and far more resonant than the sum of these parts. That’s one of its signal strengths. MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON is a title that announces itself with "Call me Ishmael" forthrightness. 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. Last modified on Fri 25 Oct 2019 16.41 BST, There is a moment in My Name Is Lucy Barton when the protagonist, struggling to find her voice on a creative writing course, is advised: “You will have only one story… You’ll write your one story many ways. ‘Lucy Barton’ Review: Laura Linney Finds Her Perfect Match. Tickets Through Feb. 29 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater; manhattantheatreclub.com. 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. Sound design by John Leonard. But Lucy conveys an abiding air of surprise that all this happened to her. And they of course aren’t the whole truth. ), Linney and Strout, in contrast, are almost seamlessly well-matched. It's clear that Lucy's mother, Lydia, remembers certain things very … Oh, I was happy speaking with my mother this way!”. Photo: Matthew Murphy. 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. Read more. Do read "My Name Is Lucy Barton" first to fully appreciate "Anything Is Possible." Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. ‘My Name is Lucy Barton’ returns in January 2019.I have not read Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 novel ‘My Name is Lucy Barton’. 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. In June 2018 Laura made her London theatre debut in Richard Eyre’s limited three-week run of My Name Is Lucy Barton, the stage play adapted from the Elizabeth Strout novel of the same name and opened to rave reviews. 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. And Elizabeth Strout’s haunting new novel is, in fact, a kind of book-within-a-book, framed as a memoir or possibly an autobiographical novel. Aside to Elizabeth Strout: YOU are a ruthless writer! Manuel Harlan. Also My Name is Lucy Barton suggests that watching one character ruminate a bout her life following a mysterious illness can catalyze an audience’s own personal reflections and revelations; in this sense, it’s profound. 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. There's a veil of ambiguity over the whole novel that made me constantly question what I was reading. 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. ‘My Name is Lucy Barton’ returns in January 2019.I have not read Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 novel ‘My Name is Lucy Barton’. Still, My Name Is Lucy Barton is much larger and far more resonant than the sum of these parts. Open this photo in gallery: The new novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout, shown in … Her hospitalization reunites her with the mother she hasn’t seen in years. 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. 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