Kate Atkinson is a popular novelist with a devoted following. But while many warmed to the breezy naturalism of Behind the Scenes at the Museum, her métier is not the stage.
Atkinson's debut play revolves around recent divorcée Elizabeth, who celebrates her independence by purchasing a period apartment that looks like a cross between Lord Irvine's Westminster residence and the fit-up for an amateur production of the Hound of the Baskervilles.
You can tell there is something fishy going on because there's a funny smell, a wonky floorboard and a spectral figure in a governess's outfit pounding ominous piano chords in the corner.
Elizabeth, her bitchy sister Kitty and their lesbian friend Susie contrive not to notice this, however, while the intermittent floorboard effect only seems to work when the sound man remembers to press the button, though you can detect the sound of the plot creaking throughout.
The purpose of the governess is revealed when she leaps from her piano stool into a tight spotlight and cries, "I am a piece of shoddy", clearly aware that she is doomed to haunt a fairly shoddy piece. For Abandonment is not just a bad play, but two bad plays bundled together.
Clearly dissatisfied with the aimless soul-searching of her modern tale, Atkinson counterpoints it with a lurid Victorian melodrama, in which the governess feels her illicit love to be "sweet poison flowing through my veins", while the bitchy sister re-emerges dressed as Miss Scarlet.
The actors work hard with the laborious dialogue, but the real problem is that Atkinson has failed to make a distinction between novelistic reportage and dramatically revealed action.
· Until April 26. Box office: 01904 623568.
