Director Felix Phillips, the protagonist of Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed, is on top of Canada’s theatrical world when the novel opens. But his spendthrift and drama-queen ways, including a Macbeth production featuring chainsaws, have irritated his government and corporate masters, leaving him vulnerable to a coup plotted by his treacherous deputy. Distracted by grief at the deaths of his wife and daughter, and his Trump-sized self-absorption—“I did make him a kind of a lunatic and control freak,” Atwood cheerfully allows—Felix never sees his downfall coming.
Soon fired as artistic director of a lightly disguised Stratford Festival—very lightly, given his surname is a nod to former Stratford director Robin Phillips—Felix flees to self-exile in a hermit-like cell in the truOntario countryside. There, he settles down to a prolonged stint of communing with his late daughter, Miranda. He broods on his injuries until, 12 years later, fortune offers a chance for revenge.
If it all sounds familiar, it’s supposed to. Hag-Seed is Atwood’s take on The Tempest, and her entry in the Hogarth Shakespeare project—celebrated authors “reimagining” the Bard’s plays in novel form. - from a McCleans In Depth interview
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Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood review – an inventive riff on The Tempest - The Guardian
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