KATE Atkinson is "particularly pleased" Abandonment is being staged at York Theatre Royal. Not only because it is her home-city theatre she so loved from childhood but also because "Abandonment is a proper proscenium arch play".

In Autumn 2000, artistic director Damian Cruden had directed Atkinson's York novel, Behind The Scenes At The Museum, on an expansive set and once more the Theatre Royal stage is used to its maximum length, width and height for Abandonment's English premiere. By contrast, the play itself has been streamlined by half an hour since its 2000 Edinburgh Festival debut.

Atkinson, who attended the opening night last Friday, surely would have been impressed by the dimensions of Dawn Allsopp's set, a Victorian Gothic room that was once the drawing room of a big Bristol town house and now is the new flat of recently divorced history lecturer Elizabeth (Julie Teal).

This is a flat haunted by visitors from present and past: not only family, friend, new lover and builder but dry rot in the woodwork and ghostly former inhabitants. No wonder the theatre's own ghost, the Grey Lady, has allegedly been making her presence felt too.

Cruden's atmospheric account of Atkinson's acrimonious domestic drama - her first original stage play - opens with the spectral figure of Catherine Hamilton's young governess Agnes idly playing an ironic There Is No Place Like Home at the grand piano. Thunder shatters the calm, and the present takes over from the past, with the past looking on.

Atkinson is adamant she is not "anti-family" but nevertheless Abandonment has not one but two unhappy families.

First there is Elizabeth, abandoned in a gents' loo at birth, adopted and now abandoned by her husband, who had slept with her bitter journalist sister, Kitty (Katerina Jugati), who in turn felt resentment at "not being chosen". Their mother, Enid (sterling late replacement Christine Cox), is more acid still, angry at their lack of love.

Enter, lesbian best friend Susie (Caroline Gruber(, who wants a baby; Jim the nave young builder (Marcello Walton) and suave photographer Alex (David Leonard, panto villain of this parish). Then there is the equally dysfunctional Victorian family: bitchy Laetitia (Jugati), wastrel husband Merric (Leonard, as elegant as his coat), aloof mother Lavender (Cox), maid Gertie (Gruber) and love-struck Agnes (the outstanding Hamilton).

Babies, wanted, unwanted, unplanned, dead and abandoned, link past and present in an elliptical story that is just that little too perfectly crafted and rounded but has withering wit, vulnerability and home truths coursing through its fractious veins.

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Updated: 10:12 Wednesday, April 09, 2003