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.”

Which begs a question. Atwood, 67, has written 11 novels. The Blind Assassin won her the Booker in 2005, her fourth nomination. She has published some 40 books as a poet, children’s writer and essayist. Many of her novels have become plays, from her first, The Edible Woman (1969), to her most famous, the postapocalyptic The Handmaid’s Tale, which Harold Pinter also adapted for a 1990 film and which even became an opera by the Danish composer Poul Ruders. Now Atwood’s first play will be seen from July 27, when her adaptation of her own The Penelopiad begins in Stratford. Can she succeed where Dickens and Eliot did not?

“Well,” she qualifies, “it’s not technically my first. I did put on a home economics opera in 1956. It was about nylon – Orlon, actually.”

On first read, The Penelopiadlooks only slightly more stageable than Nylon: The Opera. It takes place in modern-day Hades; it stars Penelope, who famously did nothing for 20 years, waiting for her husband. It borrows most of its impetus from Homer’s Odyssey, of which it is a sardonically homely retelling (“Chapter XI: Helen ruins my life”). The only obviously dramatic thing about it is Odysseus’s hanging of Penelope’s 12 maids for being unclean. The dead women supply a verse chorus in a modern, salty brogue.

Atwood’s past interviews are as chilling a read as any of her wry, double-edged narratives of disenfranchised women. Metaphors abound of ice, queens and bees. You’d be forgiven for concluding that drama is not her medium. After all, theatre involves a lot of other people and, in print at least, she doesn’t appear to be very fond of them.

“The first thing I learnt about drama is that it is a collaborative endeavour,” she insists cheerfully.

“And collaboration is always fun. It was Phyllida Lloyd who thought this could work on the stage.” Lloyd, who had directed the opera of The Handmaid’s Tale, organised a rehearsed reading of The Penelopiad in St James’s Piccadilly in 2005.

“The RSC came along, and lo, here we are. There’s been little bits of text whizzing hither and thither through the airwaves, and there still are, as the cast try things out.

“But I didn’t find it difficult because I didn’t worry overly much about how they were going to do it. Actors are amazing. They can do anything. They say: ‘Now I’m a maid, playing another maid,’ and you buy it. It’s a magic act.” Atwood approved the show’s director, Josette Bushell-Mingo, a woman who is used to bringing seemingly unstageable stories to life. In 2000 she was nominated for an Olivier award for her acting role in The Lion King. “There, you can see the actors moving the elephant on stage,” she says. “But if the vision is right, if the story is there, it works. The audience agrees to go with you.”

Bushell-Mingo describes her job as “making things present. Memory becomes reenactment. The maids retell the stories that Penelope remembers. They become Odysseus, fighting a Cyclops. They become Sparta, with pot bellies and bad wigs and terrible Greek music.” Her enthusiasm mounts. “It’s a big nod to cabaret, very active, and we don’t assume anything, no knowledge of Homer, no knowledge of Hades. Hades is a magical creative space.”

Atwood’s enthusiasm is more subdued. She admits to nerves, though not for herself: “It’s like your child’s piano recital. You want them to do well. But if they throw up all over the keys, there’s nothing you can do.” She plans to be in Stratford midway through the run, before going off to make her customary appearance at the Edinburgh Book Festival.

And the question of the dubious legacy of the novelist-turned-playwright? “Maybe what I’ll learn is that I oughtn’t to ever do this again. Perhaps all those novelists-turned-playwrights of the past were trying to warn me off. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

— The Penelopiad previews at the Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon (0844 8001110, www.rsc.org.uk ) from July 27 and opens on August 2

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