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Barbara Loots
MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON, currently onstage at the Baxter Theatre, follows the title character, who is recovering in hospital from an unknown ailment. She awakes one day to find her estranged mother sitting next to her hospital bed. At the centre of the play is their rediscovery of a connection through reflection on a shared difficult past.
When I encountered Lucy Barton for this first time it was through the words of award-winning writer, Elizabeth Strout. I found escape, salvation, and hope in the art of storytelling to be at the heart of the mother-daughter relationship that is at the centre of the Pulitzer Prize winning book, MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON.
It was with great excitement and expectation that I went to go see the current staging of the play by the same name. Sadly, I left feeling that playwright Rona Munro merely scratched at the surface when taking Lucy from page to stage. The script that takes form onstage falls short of properly interrogating the connecting dots of the anecdotes that serve to open up communication and a sense of understanding between Lucy and her mom. It relies on important moments in the book, without doing any of the heavy lifting done by Strout in setting up the emotional build up to those stories of shared memories and acquaintances linking mother and daughter.
In the middle of the book, Lucy’s character makes a comparative reference to Blanche Du Bois (the main character in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire) who always relied on the kindness of strangers. Although the playwright is in no way required to incorporate such texts as a copy and paste exercise, something of that resonates with the way the character perceives herself should at least be established. Without that breadcrumb being dropped into the text in one form or another, the moment Lucy (whilst reflecting on her childhood as one characterised by poverty and hardship) shares with the audience that she sometimes wished a stranger could come and save her and take her away as a child, has no real depth apart from being a factual telling. Similarly, Lucy’s reference to the sad passing of a friend loses impact without her sharing with the audience the moment she encountered a patient dying of AIDS while she was in the hospital and recognizing the fear that she saw in the stranger’s eyes. Her mom’s fascination with Elvis also rings hollow as the play doesn’t properly set up a moment of anger that Lucy experiences when she assumes her mother being flippant when referring to the cares of the rich and famous. In the book, you experience a moment where the lead character is flawed in assuming much about her mother without knowing enough about her past to make snap judgments. The play does not show Lucy as being overly judgmental in that moment, it just kind of flits by and moves on.
The play shows Lucy as being ruthless in her pursuit of being a writer, instead of showing her as someone who connectswith stories at a personal level, as a sense of escape. It does not explore the journey that sets her apart as a storyteller,rather it shows her as someone who scrappily had to fight her way out of poverty. The Lucy on the page feels more well-rounded than the one you encounter on the stage.
It’s true one can’t capture everything unpacked in a novel when transforming it into a stage play, but at the very least the essence and tone of the story should stay true.
Here the essence of the book is somewhat diminished in the transition of the story into a play. Where the book has a sense of quiet gravitas –giving you a glimpse of two women reconnecting in the eye of a personal and emotional storm– the play feels more jittery, with constant movement and gesturing. The play left me with a sense of emotional exhaustion, rather than the calm sense of purpose that is found when engaging with Lucy in the world sketched by Strout.
The play also diminishes the nuances of Lucy’s mother to a caricature rather than an intriguing and complex persona that embraced storytelling as an escape, setting up a shared love between a mother and daughter who did not always see eye-to-eye. Instead of delving into that wealth of substance, Munro’s script makes light of the mom’s character, which does away with part of the charm of the mother-daughter dynamic.
From a script perspective, I found MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON to fall short of what is required. In fact, it also falls short of what is promised, as the play leans heavily on the success of the book to give it relevance. It feels as if Munro’s Lucy is passing herself off as Strout’s Lucy but without the necessary characterisation to fully fool those who have come to appreciate the depth of Strout’s Lucy. So viewed, the play greatly limits the character growth that can be explored by the actor and director tackling the mammoth task of doing justice to the expectation that comes with MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON.
If you walk into MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON having had no previous interaction with Strout’s award-winning novel, you’ll possibly like the play for the simplicity in just giving a snapshot of one woman’s struggles as she owns her story as her own, while reflecting on a childhood and life that at times felt somewhat out of step with the rest of the world. You have until 5 October 2024 to go see the current staging of MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON onstage at the Baxter Theatre. Tickets can be booked online through Webtickets.
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