Linney takes on My Name is Lucy Barton for London stage debut

Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton is being adapted for the stage with American actress Laura Linney taking up the title role in her London stage debut.

The short novel will reportedly be adapted by Scottish writer Rona Munro and directed by Richard Eyre, at the Bridge Theatre in June this year. It will be performed by Linney as a one-woman monologue.

The book was published Viking two years ago and made the Man Booker Prize longlist in July 2016. It follows the character of writer Lucy Barton recovering from an operation in hospital. She wakes to find her mother sitting by her bed, who she has not seen for years, and whose visit reminds Lucy of her difficult rural childhood.

Linney is a three-time Academy Award and four-time Tony nominee and has appeared in films such as “Love Actually” and “Mr Holmes”.

It is the latest show to be announced at Nicholas Hytner and Nick Starr’s 900-seat theatre Bridge, which opened in October near City Hall. The pair previously ran London’s National Theatre.

It was Hytner who decided to adapt the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s novel for the stage according to the www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/jan/24/laura-linney-to-make-london-stage-debut-in-my-name-is-lucy-barton">Guardian with director Eyre “already a fan”.

Eyre told the Guardian that it was “extraordinary” and “wonderfully eloquent” novel, adding that its themes of loneliness, alienation and class may have more resonate more in the class-obsessed UK than the US.

Viking bought the book along with a short story collection in 2016. The collection, Anything is Possible, was based in Lucy Barton's fictional hometown and was published in May 2017.

Strout won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel, Olive Kitteridge (Simon & Schuster), and it was was turned into an HBO miniseries.

"My Name is Lucy Barton" will have a three-week run at the Bridge Theatre, London, from 2nd to 23rd June. For more information, visit the theatre's website.