Novelist Kate Atkinson has given her first stage play an English twist for its premiere south of the border, reports Charles Hutchinson

SINCE Kate Atkinson's Abandonment was premiered by the Traverse Theatre at the 2000 Edinburgh Festival, only amateur companies have staged the play.

From next Friday, however, York Theatre Royal is giving her first original stage play its English professional premiere in her home city.

In doing so, Abandonment will become the second Theatre Royal production of an Atkinson work: the first being Bryony Lavery's adaptation of Behind The Scenes At The Museum, her 1995 novel set in York.

As with that Autumn 2000 production, the director is the Theatre Royal's artistic director, Damian Cruden. "Damian came up to see it at the Traverse, and he's been asking to do it ever since, so now he is. He did a great job on Behind The Scenes, so I have a lot of faith in him," says Kate, who will be attending the opening performance.

"I spent my childhood and my adolescence going to the Theatre Royal, and I think it's a beautiful theatre that's exactly suited to Abandonment."

In Abandonment, themes of love, life, identity and relationships are woven into the intriguing story of the recently divorced Elizabeth, who wants to be left alone to get on with her new life and homemaking.

Her interfering mother, sister, best friend and even the builder are determined to haunt her every waking moment, and if that were not enough, her newly renovated Victorian house possesses more than dry rot and creaky floorboards. Long forgotten stories and former inhabitants are trying to make their presence felt.

The original setting was Kate's adopted home city of Edinburgh, with its distinctive big houses. Now the Victorian house has moved across the border.

"It was a very Scottish play and it would have been overloaded with 'Scottishness' in England, and as I didn't want to do that I decided to Anglicise it," she says. "It's now a generic English location, theoretically Bristol, because I was looking for somewhere that had big houses like Edinburgh, but there's nothing Bristolian in it.

"In fact I've made a few changes, and I've cut it a bit too to make a shorter running time. It's lost about 1,000 words, though I couldn't tell you where now."

How did writing a play differ from her novel writing?

"It's easier in some senses in that it's quick but it's more difficult in that you're reliant on dialogue," she says. "I didn't want to overburden it with authorial presence so there aren't many stage instructions, and I've built in an emptiness, which is hard to do - but I've learnt to trust actors, as I have a lot of actors as friends so I've come to understand them."

Kate says Abandonment is not what she provocatively calls a "London play". "It's not stripped down in the fashionable way, but full of language and the real way people speak. People like to see realism and lots of things happening, so it's never boring... and I'm so often bored in the theatre."

Abandonment, York Theatre Royal, April 4 to 26. Box office: 01904 623568.

Updated: 09:50 Friday, March 28, 2003