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Kate Atkinson has won praise and prizes, including the Whitbread, for her fiction. And her first full-length piece for the stage is a three-hour affair that bears all the hallmarks of the novelist's play: it is packed with themes, issues and criss-crossing narrative strands but, for all its bulging unwieldiness, it makes you rather hope Atkinson will persevere with the stage. Like many popular works - such as AS Byatt's Possession and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia - it hinges on the collision between two periods. In the present we see Elizabeth, a childless, forty-ish historian, moving into a flat in a converted Victorian mansion where she is constantly invaded by her adoptive mother and sister, her lesbian best friend, an amorous photographer and a New Age builder. But Elizabeth also disturbs the ghosts of the house's past occupants: most specifically, Agnes, an 1860s governess who was seduced by her Darwinian employer, aroused the jealousy of his spiritualist wife and came to a predictably sticky end. As the play proceeds, echoes between past and present feverishly multiply. Atkinson throws out so many ideas it is difficult to know where to start. But I suspect one key to her teeming play lies in its title: it is partly about the multiple meanings of female abandonment. As a baby Elizabeth was left in a gents' toilet and is haunted by the identity of her real mother. But she also experiences Dionysian ecstasy with the sexy snapper by whom she is eventually abandoned. And in a similar way the ghostly Agnes is impregnated and then discarded by the house's master, reducing her, in Victorian terms, to the status of an abandoned woman. History, Atkinson implies, endlessly repeats itself with the difference that women now have the chance to move from passive victims to active agents. What Atkinson tends to forget is the key difference between fiction and drama. The novel, as Henry James said, is a "baggy monster" that can contain copious themes: a play is a necessarily more compressed affair that requires a tighter focus. But Atkinson throws in everything but the kitchen sink: reason and religion, biological clocks and individual imperatives, chaos theory and historical determinism. And, having introduced so many different narrative strands, she is forced to plait them together with indecent haste. But, although her play resembles an overstuffed travelling trunk, it has the virtues of its defects: it is clearly the product of Atkinson's own obsessions, and its overflowing abundance suggests a rare spiritual generosity. You feel that Atkinson has many more plays within her. And, whatever discipline is lacking in the writing, it is more than made up for by John Tiffany's production which expertly mixes contemporary angst and Victorian Gothic. Patricia Kerrigan is all tremulous and soul-searching as the abandoned historian, Elaine C Smith exudes earthy common sense as her promiscuous sister and there is strong support from Sheila Reid as her pursed-lipped adoptive mother and from Michelle Gomez as the exploited Bronte-esque governess. It kicks off a Traverse season dominated by women dramatists. And it proves that even if Atkinson has a lot to learn formally, she has arrived at theatrical customs with a huge amount to declare. Till August 26. Box office:
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