When it was announced that US stage and screen actress Laura Linney was to make her UK stage debut directed by Richard Eyre I jumped at the chance to go; since she first came to my attention in the late 1990s, Laura Linney has been an actress that I have admired for her crisp and cool performances in both comedy and drama on both big and small screens. She did not disappoint, she was remarkable on stage... the play however...
It was all the more annoying as Eyre's production is beautifully nuanced and paced throughout it's 90 minute running time, helped by Peter Mumford's subtle lighting and Bob Crowley's elegant set design. Sadly the play - an adaptation by Rona Munro of a novel by Elizabeth Strout - felt too thin for the energy expended on it by the creative team.
Laura Linney played the titular character Lucy Barton, a successful novelist living in her beloved New York with her husband and two children, everything the way it should be. But Lucy is admitted to an up-market hospital with an illness that proves hard to diagnose so her expected short stay drags on for weeks and she feels herself coming adrift from her life despite the trust she puts in her elderly Jewish doctor. Worried how Lucy is alone most of the time, her husband calls Lucy's estranged mother from the Midwest to come and keep her company in the hospital.
This situation is fraught with problems, especially as mother and daughter have had a distant relationship for some years with little points of contact. As her mother bombards her with long-forgotten inhabitants of the same town where Lucy grew up, the daughter muses on their relationship and the more painful memories of living with a father who returned from WWII psychologically damaged.
What her childhood did give Lucy was a yearning to read and write and instilled in her the desire to get away from her limited options for success in her small town and escape to NY to become a writer. A wary relationship develops between mother and daughter again but as soon as Lucy appears to be on the mend, her mother disappears as abruptly as she arrived; it is only later on when Lucy has to re-evaluate her life that she can join the dots between her parents and her own children.
I am sure that people who know the book might get something more out of seeing it dramatized but I found myself enervated by the story which for all it's psychological digging and attempt to write about the current landscape of American lives, I just found to be just a modern take on the big-dreams-in-a-small-city tale which in the past would have served as the engine to many a Joan Crawford or Barbara Stanwyck star vehicle, or a mundane tv-movie of the week.
Added to that, the rather tentative psychological insights of the play - which takes in such touchstones as the Holocaust, the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, and September 11th - reminded me of what Virginia Woolf said of the writing of a contemporary female writer "It aims to soar but agrees to perch". Although to be honest, it was in this last part of the play, when Lucy tells us of all that happened after leaving the hospital, that Laura Linney really came into her own and held us all in the palm of her hand.
Her cool, reserved quality was a good way in to the play and Crowley's spare set of a hospital bed, a night-stand and a chair, meant that all attention was focused on her exquisite performance which included a subtle shift in accent when playing the mother which gave that character a distinctive personality. Linney's humane Lucy Barton held the audience rapt until the final well-deserved ovation.
I am so pleased to have seen this remarkable actress finally on stage in such a nicely calibrated production... it's just a shame I found the play to not be worthy of their talents. I have now been to The Bridge three times and each time have left vaguely unsatisfied. Maybe it's the space itself?
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