Margaret Atwood's new play

Novelist Margaret Atwood has adapted her novel, The Penelopiad, into a play that will open at The Swan next month. In The Times, Lucy Powell asks her about what it was like adapting her own work.

Margaret Atwood is about to join the long list of famous novelists who have turned playwright – a list that she’s the first to admit does not make encouraging reading. “They had this idea that beautiful actors would speak their wonderful lines and everybody would swoon,” says Atwood in her Canadian drawl, on the line from her home in Toronto. George Eliot? “Awful.” Charles Dickens? “A dabbler.” Henry James? “Well, yes.” Tennyson’s verse dramas? “Frankly pretty dreadful. Apparently it’s because they’d never worked in theatre.”