Culture Street

Three–time Academy Award and four-time Tony nominee Laura Linney makes her debut on the London stage this month. It is hard to believe that it’s the first time she has appeared on stage in London, having made a name for herself in theatre in the US. She was recently on stage in Broadway performing with Cynthia Nixon (Sex and the City) in The Little Foxes.

Linney plays Lucy Barton, the only character in the adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s Booker Prize-longlisted and Pulitzer winning novel My Name is Lucy Barton. She rises to the challenge of performing a 90-minute monologue in the recently opened Bridge Theatre. It is the second time she has worked with director Richard Eyre, following the revival of The Crucible at the Virginia Theatre in New York in 2002.

Alone on stage Linney plays a woman waking form an operation to find her mother sitting at the foot of her bed. She hasn’t seen her in years, and her visit brings back to Lucy her desperate rural childhood, and her escape to New York. As she begins to find herself as a writer, she is still gripped by the urgent complexities of family life.

You can still book tickets to the play here. You can buy the book here in Australia and here in the UK.